Best practice for creating a variables page in php?

Question

I have to create an administrator control panel and I want to create a php page that just contains variables that can be changed by the administrator and that would affect the rest of the website. Is there a specific best practice method for this? I used the array method below because I saw phpBB (open source forum software) using it. (and of course on my actual website, one php file would create just arrays/array and other php files will contain functions editing the array variables)

<?php
$acp_array = array(
    'apple' => 'red',
    'grass' => 'green',
    'sky' => 'blue'
);
print_r($acp_array);

echo '<br />';

$acp_array['sky'] = 'purple';
print_r($acp_array);
?>

Also, how would I make the array variable change (in my example the change from blue to purple for the sky variable) permanent? Or is there a better and different way to store php variables that should be used through the site globally?

Answer 1

For an admin control panel I'd recommend setting up your config key=>val pairs in a database. Easily scalable, and you don't have to worry about setting write permissions to a PHP file.

Example table:

Table 'site_config'

| id    | key   | val   |
|_______|_______|_______|
| 1     | apple | red   |
| 2     | grass | green |
| 3     | sky   | blue  |