Storing site settings on the server

[eluser]BrianDHall[/eluser]
I just use an associative array and serialize it. The only performance issue with serialize is if you have massive data being stuck into as it wasn't designed for that, but for configuration it's easy.

So I just have a single column in my user table such as "user_preferences" which contains a serialized associative array, so once unserialized it becomes as simple as $userpref['homepage'], etc.