> pulling every record from a db table to iterate over to find the record using PHP string compare functions
As horrible as this sounds, this is actually good from a refactoring point of view because it should be straightforward to rewrite it to use actual queries.
Perhaps technically true, but the entire point of the MVC is you can do simple record retrievals with a single line of code using auto generated active record models. One line vs a monstrous dirty function isn't acceptable.
As horrible as this sounds, this is actually good from a refactoring point of view because it should be straightforward to rewrite it to use actual queries.