[thelist] Unsubcribe

[Garrett Coakley]

On Thu, 31 Jan 2002 09:25:07 -0800
Howard Cheng <howcheng at ix.netcom.com> wrote:


> Here's how to unsubscribe:

[snip]

As funny as that was.... you owe a tip *:)

G.


<tip type="Programming Tip" author="Garrett Coakley">

When you're building an app in PHP[1] that involves a number of files
which all need access to some core variables, then why not stick them in
a master config file and include that file where needed. Even better,
stick them in an array and keep your global namespace tidy.

As an example, have a look at how the Geeklog project does it:

[garrett at cincinnati ~]$ more config.php
$_CONF['path']          = '/var/www/polytechnic/';
$_CONF['path_system']   = $_CONF['path'] . 'system/';
$_CONF['path_html']     = $_CONF['path'] . 'public/';
$_CONF['path_log']          = $_CONF['path'] . 'logs/';
$_CONF['path_language'] = $_CONF['path'] . 'language/';
$_CONF['rdf_file']      = $_CONF['path_html'] . 'backend/geeklog.rdf'

Here you can see that they have set up an associative array called
$_CONF which contains entries for all the major configuration switches.

This file gets called in each page with:

include_once('/var/www/polytechnic/config.php');

and the variables are accessed by referring to $_CONF['keyname'].

Once benefit of this is the portability of the code. If you need to move
your site to another server with a slightly different file system, lets
say it keeps web files in /home/httpd instead of /var/www as I have
above, then all you need to do is change the entry in the config file
for $_CONF['path'] and away you go.


[1] Just as an example because it's what I work with, Perl/CF/ASP etc
all have similar methods that you can use.

</tip>

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