Question

I’m building my own personal CMS right now with PHP and MySql and I’m not sure of the best way to store site-wide variables such as the site name. What would be the proper way? (If you could provide a brief explanation that would be really nice too. 😉

EDIT: The variables would need to be editable from within the CMS.

Answer 1

In my opinion the best way is to store it in a config file (I use .ini files, but you could easily use a file like below).

I prefer this to storing it in a MySQL database, as it allows you to still get variables (like site name, or admin email address) even if the database is down

<?php
    define('SITE_NAME','My CMS');
    define('SITE_URL','http://www.example.com');
    define('ADMIN_EMAIL','[e-mail]');
?>

EDIT:

Create a table like this

id    key    value
-------------------
1     name   My Cms
2     url    http://www.example.com

And access it like this (at the top of every page)

<?php
    $config = array();
    $query = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM config');
    while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($query)) {
        $key = $row['key'];
        $value = $row['value'];
        $config[$key] = $value;
    }

    echo $config['name'];
?>