Chris Hartjes has posted his method for creating a development setup that lets you use multiple environments with your code.
In anticipation of my talk at PHP Quebec 2009 I've been going over my slides and thinking about what I'm going to update for it. One little nugget I'd thought I'd share is one way of handling having multiple environments your code must run in.
It uses a PHP variable in the $_SERVER superglobal - a custom one, APP_ENV - set by the application and checked to ensure global options are correctly set.