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Using an engine to create content with PHP - but how should it happen?

I need to create an engine that will allow me to add content to a website. The website is a browser-based game. This is a verbose engine that should be able to handle many different aspects of the project.

For an example, I want the developers to be able to insert "dreams" into the game. A dream is called each night for the player, and upon login they will see the dream they had. A developer will write up a cool dream for the game and insert it... but to where?

That's what I'm struggling with. Naturally, I think to myself that all content for the game will enter a database once a developer is done with it. However, the amount of content could be potentially very high, and it may be too hard on the server's resources once the game grows bigger - userbase included. The other way to do it to simply hardcode everything in: a simple "dreams" file that a developer would append their dream to. I cannnot have such a system, however, if this project were to have five casual developers that don't know how to even open a PHP tag! ;)

Presently the best way I can imagine a player receiving a dream is to have a developer write it and then the database pulls the dream the player receives from the database. It seems unnecessarily arduous and I'm hoping that if I still must use a database, that you folks can steer me into the right direction for how to execute this efficiently.