PHPit.net is back again today with yet another great tutorial. This time, they help you create a class to manage the settings for your application that not only supports plain-text, but INI, XML, and YAML formats as well.

A config.php or a settings.xml file is a very common thing for most PHP scripts, and it's usually where all the script settings (e.g. database information) are stored. The easiest way is to simply use a simple PHP script as a config file, but this may not be the best way, and it's certainly not the most user-friendly way.

In this tutorial we'll have a look at creating a Settings class which can handle any type of config format. I'll take you through the steps necessary to handle four different formats (PHP, INI, XML and YAML), but it's very easy to add more formats.

To start, they build the base class before quickly adding the get() and load() functions to pull in the external content. First on the list, they extend the base and make a pure PHP implementation holding the settings. Following that, they move on to the INI format, using PHP's parse_ini_file function to make it simple.

Last but not least, they venture into something a bit more complex - working with XML and the YAML formats to create this simple, handy tool.

There's one thing that coders look for when they get past the most basic bits of PHP - a way to store information between the requests. Thankfully, PHP has that functionality build in (for quite a while now, actually) and it's very easy to use. Sessions make storing data simple and, according to this new post on the Zend Developer Zend, there's even more fun things you can get them to do - with the right convincing.

By default, session data is stored on the filesystem in individual files. This works fine for most people, but when it comes to storing session data, PHP has several options available. This article will discuss some of the built-in options for session storage and also show you how to write your own session handler.

They cover some of the options that you can alter (in the php.ini) to change the defaults for your sessions, including where they're written to. With those basics out of the way, the real meat of the tutorial comes in - the creation of a custom session handler. They base theirs on a few simple functions like open, read, write, destroy, etc. There's no code for those functions, but they do provide good descriptions for what they should do. To wrap it all up, they give the "howto" on actually using this functionality in your application.

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