bouba

A database is just a data storage. Ideally you should design your application to work irrespective of the database in the back-end. You can achieve that by using PDO or if you wish app frameworks such as Zend or CodeIgniter or Yii.

The text is printed properly; it's just that browsers don't render the newline character (unless when inside <textarea>). To render it you need to use the php function nl2br which transforms newlines to <br> tags.

If your project requires the user to have an admin back-end to edit content you are better off using a CMS. Otherwise you will have to write your own content administration system with whatever framework you use. A good lightweight framework is ExpressionEngine but it's not free; a not so lightweight one would be Joomla. Framework wise I think Yii and CodeIgniter are the best both in terms of weight and performance (which are somewhat related).

My favorite is Yii mainly because it's truly completely OO. Its architecture and design makes far more sense than CIs especially its database access and AR implementation. It is not as full featured as Zend but it integrates very nicely with it. I would usually install both and import the Zend components that I nee such as the web services.