From Vidyut Luther today, there's this new post that asks the question "Where do you 'define' your environment/global settings?"

I was wondering how people handled this situation themselves. I'm personally trying to decide whether my constants be in the class files, or a global configuration file. Right now I have a global.conf.php which contains things like (MySQL login info, include paths, table names).

So, my question is: Is it better to have one big configuration file, or should some things be defined on top of the individual classes ? (CONTACTS_TABLE.. is a clear example). I see pros and cons for both approaches.

He lists out pros and cons for the "one file approach" versus the "multiple specific definitions" method, for example:

• simple editing vs. easier to manage
• a single large file vs. multiple small files
• high memory usage on every page vs. lower memory consumption from loading only what's needed