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Asked: 2026-05-10T20:22:25+00:00

I wrote a small PHP application that I’d like to distribute. I’m looking for

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I wrote a small PHP application that I’d like to distribute. I’m looking for best practices so that it can be installed on most webhosts with minimal hassle.

Briefly: It’s simple tool that lets people download files once they login with a password.

So my questions are:

1) How should I handle configuration values? I’m not using a database, so a configuration file seems appropriate. I know that other php apps (e.g. WordPress) use defines, but they are global and there is potential that the names will conflict. (Global variables also have the same problem, obviously.) I looked at the ‘ini’ file mechanism built into PHP. It only allows comments at the top – so you can’t annotate each setting easily – and you can’t validate syntax with ‘php -f’. Other options?

2) How to handle templating? The application needs to pump out a form. Possibly with an error message. (e.g. ‘Sorry, wrong password.’) I’ve have a class variable with the HTML form, but also allow an external template file to be used instead (specified in the config). I do some trivial search and replace – e.g. %SCRIPT% to the name of the script, %STATUS% to hold the error message. This feels a bit like reinventing the wheel, but including a templating system like Smarty is overkill. (Plus they may already have a templating system.) Other options?

3) i18n – There are only 3 message strings, and gettext doesn’t seem to be universally installed. Is it such a bad idea just to make these three strings parameters in the config file?

4) How to best integrate with other frameworks? My app is a single class. So, I thought I could just include a php script that showed how the class was called. It would be a starting point for people who had to integrate it into another framework, but also be fine as-is for those not interested in customizing. Reasonable?

5) GET/POST parameters – Is it bad form for a class to be looking at $_GET and $_POST? Should all values be passed into my class during construction?

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Configuration

    You can use a php file like this:

    <?php return array(   'option1' =&gt; 'foobar',   'option2' =&gt; 123,   //and so on...   ); ?>

    And in the main class just use:

    $config = (array) include 'path/to/config/file';

    And if you plan to mostly distribute your class as a component in other applications, then simply put config array/object as a parameter in your class’ constructor and leave the details to the user.

    Templating

    For such simple application the method your described should be enough. Remember that one can always extend your class and overload your outputting method with his own.

    I10N

    As mentioned before, for 3 variables anything more than storing them as config is just overkill.

    Integration

    Comment each public method (or even better also protected and private ones) with explanations what do they do and what parameters are needed. If you combine that with an example, it should be enough for most users.

    GET vs POST

    Your class uses passwords and you even think of sending them via GET? 😉 Think of browser history, referer headers etc – your users’ passwords would be visible there.

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