PHP MySQL custom blog, formatting post

I'm creating my own blog in PHP and want to know your opinions on how I should format my post content.

Currently I store the post content as开发者_开发百科 just plain text, call it when necessary, then wrap each line with P tags. I did this in case I wanted to change the way I formatted my text in the future and it would save me the dilema of having to remove all P tags from the posts in the DB.

Now the problem I have this this method is that if I want to add extra formatting in, e.g. lists etc those would also be wrapped with P tags which is not correct.

How would you do this, would you store text as plain text in the DB, or would you add the HTML formatting and store that in the DB to?

I'd prefer not to store unnessary HTML in the DB, but not sure of a way around it?

I think the best way would be to keep the html in the db. You would have too much to work with parsing the text if you don't use html.

See how it's done in other blog tools. I know that Joomla, for example, keeps all html in the db. I know Joomla isn't blog tool :) but still...

Wordpress stores html in the db. You say you are concerned about storing 'unnecessary' html in the db. What makes it unnecessary? I think it is the opposite. You may have headings or bold or italic text in your post. If storing as plain text, how do you save this formatting? How are you saving the lists you mentioned?

I see it as a better practice to store raw user input in the database, and format it on output, caching the result if it is needed. That way you can change the way you are parsing things easily without having to regex-replace anything inside the database. You can also store the raw input in one column, and the formatted HTML in another one.

I assume that you are formatting your raw text with the Markdown or the Textile syntax?

If you store HTML in your DB, you will be just a few clicks away from your current situation: you can use strip_tags() to remove HTML formating and in case of bigger changes, you can run HTML Tidy on your code to remap tags and classes.