Balancing Rich Text Storage: JSON versus Plain Text – Best Practices for WordPress Developers

When developing content management solutions, one common challenge is deciding how to store richly formatted text data. The core considerations involve maintaining formatting metadata, ensuring efficient searchability, and preserving cross-platform compatibility. In this article, we explore whether storing both JSON and plain text for rich text data is redundant, and recommend approaches that align with best practices.

Understanding the Needs

Rich text content often entails not just the raw text but also associated metadata—such as bold, italics, headings, hyperlinks, and other formatting styles. These details are typically stored using structured formats like JSON, which encapsulate both the content and its formatting in a machine-readable manner. Conversely, plain text provides unformatted content, stripping away any metadata.

The Trade-offs

Storing JSON:

• Advantages:
• Preserves detailed formatting and structural information.
• Facilitates rich editing experiences and complex presentation styles.

• Enables programmatic manipulation of content, such as applying transformations or extracting specific elements.

• Disadvantages:

• Searching within JSON-encoded content can be more complex and may impact performance if not optimized.
• Parsing JSON during search queries adds computational overhead.
• Cross-platform compatibility might be affected if JSON structures are not standardized or if different clients interpret data differently.

Storing Plain Text:

• Advantages:
• Simplifies search operations; text can be indexed efficiently.
• Reduces complexity in data handling and querying processes.

• Usually ensures straightforward cross-platform compatibility.

• Disadvantages:

• Loses all formatting metadata, potentially reducing the richness of content presentation.
• Additional steps needed if formatted content is required later.

Is Storing Both Redundant?

Storing both JSON and plain text may seem like a safeguard to combine the best of both worlds. However, this approach can lead to data redundancy and increased storage requirements. It also introduces the need to synchronize updates across both formats, which can complicate content management workflows.

Recommended Approaches

1. Store Rich Content in JSON, Generate Plain Text on Demand:
   Keep the formatted content in JSON within your database. When performing search queries, extract or generate plain text snippets from the JSON to enable efficient searching. This approach ensures rich formatting is preserved while maintaining search performance.

2. **Utilize Dedicated Search Indexing Solutions