Site variables in db

zzz

I'd like to save a few site variable in a db table so that the owner could change those via web interface once in a while.

Now, I'm not sure what way to implement it. Shall I access that vars when someone loads a site and save them into a session? Or what is the better way to implement this. I know it's been done before, just never had to deal with this myself.

sid

what do you mean exactly by "site variable"? i assume, something like admin email, page title, etc?

simply store the data in a table and load it into an array (or session var, to minimize the mysql-load) on page load. a simple mysql query will take care of that; i would simply save this code snippet in a file and include it at the top of each page. then you can access that array or session var after that.

bogu

Here is a little example, we have this table where we store constants name and there values (values that have the possibility to be modified from the administration cpanel):

CREATE TABLE `global_constants` (
  `name` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
  `value` varchar(255) NOT NULL default ''
) TYPE=MyISAM;

-- 
-- Dumping data for table `vars`
-- 

INSERT INTO `vars` VALUES ('_G_var1', 'Hello');
INSERT INTO `vars` VALUES ('_G_var2', 'world');

And this is how the code should look like:

/* mysql connection */
$sql_txt = "SELECT \r\n";
$sql_txt.= " name, `value` \r\n";
$sql_txt.= "FROM `global_constants` \r\n";
$sql_rez = mysql_query($sql_txt) or die(mysql_error());
if(mysql_num_rows($sql_rez)) {
	while( ($sc = mysql_fetch_assoc($sql_rez)) ) {
		if (!defined($sc['name'])) define($sc['name'],$sc['value']);
		else die("This constant {$sc['name']} has already been defined!");
	} mysql_free_result($sql_rez);
	echo _G_var1." "._G_var2."!";
} else mysql_free_result($sql_rez);

I love "Hello world!" tutorials ... 😃

Roger_Ramjet

Do you need to store them in a db? Surely there will not be that many of them and they will not change that often. You could just keep them in a file that is included into scripts - just as easy to write a file edit page as it is to write a db edit page.

If you do insist on using the db then make sure that you use Query cache for the query that extracts them. They are not going to change very often and so are an ideal candidate for query caching.