0

I am creating a small private social network community using PHP and MySQL. The thing is that the user profiles will be central and highly customizeable, with custom layout and lots of optional add-ons.

I was thinking of a database table, a user_meta table, with three columns: user_id, key, value

The problem is that the profile layouts is more like a standard HTML markup site, and the profile table will increase in amount of rows very quickly, and it is very difficult to store complex custom design in the table.

What are the disadvantages of storing the profile layouts as text datafiles on the webserver when a member updates his or her profile? The datafiles could be php-free but parsed by a custom php-viewer to display the custom profile correctly.

Is there any other best practise to handle highly custom user created data blobs, optimized for speed?

Peter Wirdemo
  • 498
  • 2
  • 11
  • 25
  • db advantage, scalable, flexible, smaller, efficient storage space, faster .. want to mix the two use caching as well –  Oct 05 '14 at 20:25
  • Thanks Dagon for the suggestion, but I can't figure out how to structure the table, should the final result be stored in a single huge Blob column? An additionally solution that has crossed my mind is to only store a set of Javascript variables that will be parsed on the client webbrowsers. – Peter Wirdemo Oct 05 '14 at 20:28
  • Okay, I will think some more about this and try to weight the advantages against each other. – Peter Wirdemo Oct 05 '14 at 20:36

0 Answers0