David Stockton has a new post to his site looking at a handy tip those using the Zend Framework for their applications can use to simplify how they handle their settings - using local configuration files.

I've run into a common issue [in my Zend Framework development]. This issue is multiple developers each needing a slightly different configuration from each other. Inevitably this means that each developer needs to maintain their own changes to a common configuration file. This tutorial shows you how to make some minor modifications to your Zend Framework MVC application to allow developers to supply their own local.ini which is not checked into the repository and can override any settings they want while not having to worry about any of the problems listed above.

He walks through the changes you'll need to make - a simple update to the bootstrap that uses Zend_Config_Ini component with the "allowModifications" setting set to true. A check is then put in to see if there's a "local.ini" file in the configuration directory and, if so, load it and potentially override the application.ini settings. It's a very handy tip for those working in a shared code base not wanting to step on any toes.