Looking for a true database system with form editing

I am designing a site (which I run as a volunteer) that will have databases of events and artefacts, and I’d like to have these as proper databases/tables (rather than serialized data, so that they can be properly searched, ordered and data extracted via PHP).

I plan to run queries and use selected fields to generate items on the page, and I don’t plan to have the database normalised (so no need for relational). And yes, I could develop this myself, but I’m getting slow in my old age.

I’ve been looking through the plugins and, although there are lots of form designers and some database managers, I can’t see anything that simply allows me to create a form which is refreshed from fields within a table and which allows editing or creating a new record, with date pickers etc.

Visual Form Designer looked perfect, except it serialises the data and I’d need to write backend PHP code to pick up the new entry, deserialise it and store the data in the table (and I can’t see a way of then pulling that data back into the form for editing).

I’m sure I’m not the only one after something so basic and I can’t help feeling I’ve missed something – so would appreciate a gentle nudge in the right direction.

Thanks