On his blog, phpcult.com, today, Vidyut Luther has posted an update to his previous post asking where people usually define their settings.

My last post created a lot of conversation about how one should go about setting configuration options for your code. I realized, no one mentioned the use of PHP's built in parse_ini_file.

function. This seems to address my problems with one large monolothic file pretty easily. I can still have a globals.conf.php which handles global settings, but I can also use this ini file, to load specific things that are only necessary for modules on an as needed basis. The global scope would be aware of the CONFIG_FILE constant, and I can parse specific sections of it whenever I need to.

He notes that he'll try it in the next few days, but I imagine he'll like what he sees - especially if he's looking for a simple, external way to change information in a file and have it affect the entire app (without changing code).