This is sooooooooo bad. I did a quick re-do of a site for some people. It was written in ASP and they wanted it converted to php/mysql. All I had was the database, no sql code or supporting files.
So, as I'm converting this site I notice that in one table there are these 3 varchar fields..."profile1", "profile2", and "profile2". They looked like they had sentence fragments in them, no complete text.
As it turns out, the original designer needed to make a part of the page hold some free-form profile text which was usually around 500 to 600 characters...so what did they do?
Yep, instead of using a "Text" column, the designer used 3 varchar fields and concatenated them on the fly to allow a larger block of text. And the original input form they built for creating entries has three textareas so you can enter the text.
This is just one of the *#^$@! things I've found...there are a whole lot of *cough* interesting techniques that this person used to create the site, along with more bad design practices than you can shake a stick at. Like using reserved words for column names (such as "Key").
