Crawling through a menu tree

[bonecone]

I'm working on a light-weight CMS and I have a table of menu items that I want to administer. The relevant fields for this question are

menu_item_id (PRIMARY KEY)
menu_item_parent
menu_item_status(PUBLISHED, UNPUBLISHED, TRASH)

If there are sub-menus, their menu_item_parent is set to the menu_item_id of the parent menu item. If I change the menu_item_status of a parent, I want the effect to cascade down through all the child menus, however many levels deep.

I tried doing this with a recursive function in PHP but the process would hang on me. I'd rather do it on the level of MYSQL if that's possible. Is there a MYSQL solution for this?

[ssystems]

On Update Cascade

[NogDog]

You might also consider using a nested set hierarchical structure for the data instead of the parent/child (adjacency list) structure.