Right now what I am mostly doing is just modifying the bits and pieces of K2 code as they are needed, but I have run into an area where I need to be able to access 'extra fields' of items, and parsing the really long string containing the fields could get messy... :(

I might be able to get really complex, and do something along these lines:
SELECT * FROM "#__k2_items"
LIKE '%{"id":"8","value":"' .$ category_id . '"}%'

But I would rather not. I would have an EVEN WORSE time trying to retreive the category ID from a specific item in the table. I would need PHP to parse each record to extract the data, right?

Is there any efficient way to get the fields without using 3 different SQL queries and lots of parsing in PHP?

I could easily add a new column in the database, however, the people working on the site (the designers) would have a very difficult time because they constantly need to go to the database in order to change the extra field value. I would rather keep all database modifications up to me (the developer) and not need them to call me every time they add an item.


Any one have any ideas?