global variables (?) thoughts

vaska

i have a little cms that uses plenty of system and user settings/preferences (which are stored in the db)...currently, i'm redundantly calling this information up each time a new page is accessed...

i'm not clear what/how is the best way to be doing this?

cookies are definitely not what i want to do...i don't believe a session is either...i do use sessions for holding some login information however...

i've been reading about global variables but i'm a little concerned and confused. i don't understand the warning that variables could be deactivated with php 5 (what exactly would this mean?)...

ideally, all i'm trying to do is grab the setting/preference information only once so it can be accessed where ever necessary...

is there some other simple method for achieving this? should i just press ahead with globals afterall?

thanks for any tips...v

leatherback

Hey,

If you are using sessions already, why not go with htat/ Of course you could parse it in each and every link you use, but that becomes very messy very quickly..

Or, do as I do: I have a check-login script, which will basically check some encoded authorisation features from the session (Basically username, timestamp, PC-IP and an combined encoded combination of the above). If those are OK, a user-preferences script is run to get all the details from the server (Userdetails table in database).

This works well for settings which are not changed a lot. Every time a user logs-on (new session) these details are checked in the d.base. the rest of the session the details are just collected. All is in one single include in the head of the page, and this include also passes the page accesinfo to the database, which has to be stored seperately anyway..