On the Delicious Brains site there's a new post from Gilbert Pellegram announcing serializededitor.com, an editor specifically designed to help visually edit serialized PHP data.

I recently built a command line daemon in PHP to emulate AWS SQSD for the purposes of testing in Mergebot. As it turns out, one of the benefits of building a large, complex product like Mergebot is that there are pieces of the system that we need to build for the project that might be of use to other developers.

Today, we’re launching that system piece, a free online visual editor for PHP serialized data as serializededitor.com.

In this article, I’ll explain how and why we built this “side” project and how I overcame some of the challenges I faced when building this project.

He starts off with the problem they were trying to solve when creating the editor, mostly centered around determining the differences between two pieces of serialized data. They found something similar to what they were wanting but it didn't provide the "easy editiing" functionality they wanted. He then goes through some of the issues they bumped up against along the way: working with the data and PHP's unserialize, the creation of their own parser, the work to create the Vue.js frontend and re-serializing the data once complete.

They've also open sourced the project over on GitHub so you can clone it locally and contribute back.