MySQL CMS Database Build

I’m ready to move our content-heavy site onto a solid MySQL foundation and need a clean, future-proof database designed and delivered. The database will drive the entire content management system, so structure, normalization, and performance are critical.

Scope
I’ll share a brief on the types of content we publish (articles, pages, media, categories, tags, users, roles, comments, and logs) along with a few edge-case workflows. Using that, I’d like you to design the schema, write the creation scripts, and provide seed data that lets me spin the database up locally in one step. Please apply best practices for indexing, referential integrity, and security (prepared-statement friendly naming, minimal privilege user accounts, etc.) so integration with PHP/Python back-ends is seamless.

Deliverables
• An ER diagram (PDF or PNG)
• SQL files to create all tables, constraints, indexes, and sample data
• A concise README that explains each table, relationships, and how to import the dump on MySQL 8+

Acceptance Criteria
1. All entities and relationships in the brief are represented and normalized to at least 3NF.
2. Full creation script executes without errors on a fresh MySQL 8 instance.
3. Queries for core CMS actions (publish, edit, list, search) return in under 100 ms on 10k sample rows.

If you have experience designing databases for CMS or similar systems, your insight on versioning and audit trails will be especially valuable.