I'm making a profile page in which I'm allowing the user to drag certain divs and customize their positions (using sortable) and I'm also allowing them to delete divs they don't want on their profile. You could compare it with an iGoogle page. My question is, what's the best way to store these kinds of settings? Do I have to create a table in the database containing user's preferences? If yes, would you give me some hints/suggestions? Thanks in advance.
creating a table will be a good idea.
you will need to have five fields in a table
primary_key user_id identifier ( the div ) position (the position of the identifier) status ( should the div be visible or not )
and when ever the user drags any thing anywhere or clicks on close button just save the identifier's position/status in the table
You could use data() to store info but it'll be just for that session. http://api.jquery.com/data/
If you want to store it permanently, then use a database.