New to Joins and codeigniter

[eluser]liam1412[/eluser]
I am new to joins; I have always coded the clumsy way with loads of queries, and using MVC this isn't so easy without having loads of code in your view.

I have 3 tables

categories
forums
posts

What I need is a multi dimensional array that would hold a list of categories and then within each category a list of forums that reside in that category and then within each forum, a post count/thread count.

With my old procedural way I can easy acheive what I want without using arrays, but with MVC I am struggling.

can anyone help me out.

Thanks from a newb to OOP/Mvc/COdeigniter all at once :-)