I’ve worked on a number of CMS systems using the .NET platform (the CMS management system is in ASP.NET, and the site which renders the content is both ASP.NET and PHP).
I’ve traditionally stored the generated content in classes that serialize to XML, which is stored in MSSQL 2005/2008 in a varchar(max) field. This has made it convenient structuarally for different consumers of the content to work with, and it can be bound to classes (for re-opening the CMS record and editing it, or for the consuming website).
However, I’ve been wondering what type of storage mechanism is popular with other CMS shops, and if anyone likes or has serious issue with the approach I’m most familiar with.
Good, bad, ugly? What would you do?
I personally treat the data as any other data that would be stored in the system, for example I have a module built for DNN that stores collection of text data, I have the following collection of columns in a table for it.
I find that this keeps the data easy to find, and it is easy to manipulate regardless of the caller.