The Zend Framework in Practice

Sometimes you need to store arrays in your MySQL (or other relational) database, but don’t want to spread the information over multiple tables. For instance, I have been working on a CMS for a website, where you need to be able to add a variable selection of images, download links and products to the page configuration. Storing these sets of information in a single field was obviously a far cleaner solution. However, I needed a simple way to encode/decode the data. (more…)