Storing custom properties for a SharePoint Site

Question

Let's say you are building a Project Management solution where each Project equals one site (SPWeb object). Each project has it's properties like: Project Manager, Budget, Customer, Description, Status etc... that need to be stored. Beside these, site contains other project items like documents, tasks etc...

What do you think would be the best practice to store these, some options I am considering, but I am open to suggestions here:

• Custom list on this site (PROS: Easy to edit, CONS: data is not uniform for single list)

• Embedded into SPWeb.Properties (PROS: Easy to develop with, CONS: No built-in user UI and other SharePoint UI benefits)

• Custom list(s) on root of this site collection (PROS: Centralized, CONS: Requires custom per-project security to implement)

• Custom Database (PROS: Relational, CONS: No SharePoint benefits here...)

Answer 1

I built a similarly structured project management solution in a previous life and used a list to store those details, the list only contained one item, and the columns were the project's metadata.

Worked quite well for rollup across all the projects to get details for all.

Answer 2

Microsoft provides some guidance in this area.

SharePoint patterns & practices Application Settings Manager

Answer 3

Have you tried http://spconfigstore.codeplex.com/ . There is a config category column that can relate to the Project This is a 2007 solution