[thelist] MySQL storage recommendation

[Matt McKeon]

I am working on a project currently in PHP & MySQL where there will be 
content generated by users that needs to be stored, big surprise. But 
the question I have is if the way I am starting it is efficient.

There will be two seperate "lists" that the users can contain anything 
from an available pool, one of them is limited in number and the other 
is only limited in the number of available options, which currently is 
around 300 items.

I have one table holding those items call it tbl_items, and another 
table holding user data, including those lists in Text fields called 
tbl_users.
I devised my own storage method similar to serialize but is easier to 
read. It simple puts the id number of an item in brackets followed by a 
string of text that users can input for each item, limited to 145 
characters. It looks like this: [23] some text users put in[39] text 
about this new item[09] ...

So my question is this a good way to store the data? I had to do some 
tweaking of my PHP code in some areas because certain operations over a 
large list, say all items, took forever. So it really got me thinking if 
this was a good storage paradigm. I need to be able to search through 
this data and sort it, update it, delete it, and so on. I'm sure some 
other guru has ran into similar issues, anyone have any suggestions of 
how to tackle this storage problem?

Thanks in advance,
  matt