I don’t hear people raving about Devshed like they should be.  These people consistently put out high quality tutorials and, luckily for us, looks like they now have a penchant for PEAR

Tired of writing (and rewriting) code to manage your application’s configuration variables? Take a look at the PEAR Config class, a PHP toolkit designed specifically for manipulating configuration files and the data within them. This article demonstrates using the Config class to read and write configuration files in XML, PHP and INI formats, and use built-in methods to easily build Web-based application configuration modules.