My first thought was the way early 1990s forum and blog scripts did it, aka the UBB/Movable Type method of storing everything as static text files in a director

My first thought was the way early 1990s forum and blog scripts did it, aka the UBB/Movable Type method of storing everything as static text files in a directory somewhere. That would be really inefficient though. I vaguely recall database driven blog and forum scripts taking over because of how poorly the old solution worked at scale.