Question

I have a little Templating class, that keeps all settings inside the php class.

These settings are: css styles, js scripts, meta tags and titles for every page. (For example on index.php I need some js-scripts, but for contacts.php – other js-files).

It’s not very comfortable to edit this configuration data, because it is in private properties of a class, and while editing programmer can make mistakes in php code).

Is it a good idea to keep this configuration data in external files? Xml/json/ini ?
Will this get site rendering much slower?

Answer 1

using.ini files is great feature in PHP:

class Template {
    private $config;
    public function __construct() {
        $this->config = parse_ini_file('templates.ini');
    }
    public function fetch() {
        $this->config['default_dir']; // example
    }
}

• Documentation http://php.net/manual/en/function.parse-ini-file.php

---

According to your comment – loading it’s not that fast. But you can always cache .ini files in memory:

class IniFiles {
    private static $_files = Array();
    public static function parse($file) {
        if(isset(self::$_files[$file])) return self::$_files[$file];
        self::$_files[$file] = parse_ini_file($file);
        return self::$_files[$file];
    }
}

class Template {
    private $config;
    public function __construct() {
        $this->config = IniFiles::parse('templates.ini');
    }
    public function fetch() {
        $this->config['default_dir']; // example
    }
}

Now it’s perfect solution. 🙂