table design for display content

Question

In my previous work station, I saw them have a table design across all website they have worked on displaying editor content like this:

column|page_id| title |content_1|... |content_n| lang  |update_date|...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
row   |   1   |varchar|   text  |text|  text   |tinyint|  datetime |
......

where content_n column are determined by the max editor it overall has on that website.

For an example: If the website generally has 1 editable content per page but in addition, there is one page that has 4 editable content, they will have 4 content_n column.

The problem(imo):

For pages that have only 1 editable content area, only content_1 will be filled, and other column content_n will be empty. In addition, with multiple languages involve, those empty field add up.

My question:

1. Is this a good design of choice?
2. Wouldn't those empty column create unnecessary overhead?
3. What would be an improved table design when have a table such as this?

My thought :

I will probably merge all the content and title into one single column(mediumtext/longtext) and use json_encode/array to differentiate the content.

they usemysql(MYISAM) for all database engineer, and I prefer Innodb..if that is matter

Answer 1

Do not build arrays as columns. Instead, use extra tables. If the different content_* are differeng languages, have another table with page_id (for JOINing), content, and lang. Probably the PRIMARY KEY would be (page_id, lang).