Simple / reusable CRUD in PHP (no cool work or big classes)

By CRUD operations, you only mean (tedious) database queries?

You can just as easily set up your database so that, with the exception of a few common fields among content types, all data for a particular content type is stored as a serialized associative array in a TEXT field.

Thus, you only need one set of CRUD queries for any particular content type, since the data passed to the CRUD function is simply blind serialized.

For example, we declare that content title, created / updated date, tags and short description are considered general data. From there we have a blog and a page content type.

I could create a database table as such:

CREATE TABLE `content` (
  `id` INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `name` VARCHAR  NOT NULL,
  `short_description` TEXT  NOT NULL,
  `tags` TEXT ,
  `data` TEXT ,
  `content_type` INT  NOT NULL,
  `created_at` DATETIME  NOT NULL,
  `updated_at` DATETIME  NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
)

      

        
        
        
      

    

(Go ahead and assume we create reference tables for content_type)

And while a blog might need data such as "pingbacks" and the page might only need a body, you just save the output of something like the following example for a blog:

$data = serialize(array(
    "body" => "Lorem ipsum",
    "pingbacks" => array()
));

      

        
        
        
      

    

Updates are simple, when you grab data from a database, you unserialize the data for editing in a form selected based on content type. The mapping works the same, just take a template based on the content type and send an unserialized dataset to it. The template should never have to worry about how the data is stored, it just gets $ data ['pingbacks'].

As for your forms, my suggestion is to break your anti-OOP precept and find a form generation library. If you can fetch it from the framework, Zend_Form with Zend_Config and Zend_Validate from Zend Framework(all Zend_Config in this situation is a convenient interface for loading and moving XML and INI files) makes life very enjoyable. You can have your XMLs define a form for each content type, and all you could do is just render the form on your page (grab the XML based on the content type), grab the filtered data, remove the "common fields" e.g. name created / updated dates and then serialize what's left in the database. No schema knowledge is required for a specific content type (unless you want to be strict).

Even though I'm personally on the sidelines, I would strongly suggest that you take a look at capturing Zend_Form (with Zend_Validate and Zend_Config) and also using Doctrine as an ORM / database abstraction layer. You may find that at least Doctrine will make your life a lot easier when it comes to performing database operations.