I'm wondering if this is the best solution. I'd like your opinion. One clarification: This is not about passing variables via cookies or in URLs. It is about passing variables to functions in PHP.

I have a project where several sites pull their content from the same database. It allows me to govern the site content for all the sites in one place no matter where I am.

The database has a list of the sites and the settings for each site. Each site has several templates unique for that site but all the sites share the same set of variables (code, name, description, search box settings, which ads to show, etc.). While the values may be the same, the variable set is the same for all the sites. There are probably around 40 variables and a large number of them are used on most pages of each site.

When a user visits a page, the code queries the database for the correct information to display on the page. It first gets the site settings, then it gets the settings for the page (including which template is used for that page), and then it runs a series of functions to retrieve the data that is displayed in the template.

Because the site settings are used repeatedly, I created one array that holds all the variables.

For the functions, I simply pass the one array and any of the variables that are needed are available to the function.

Is there a better or more efficient way of doing this?

Is all this data in one table?

The site variables are stored in three tables: sites, sitevariables, pagevariables.

I'm just wondering if passing a large number of variables via one array to the site functions is better or worse than passing individual variables to site functions. For example:


In Example 1, I have to spell out every variable that the function needs.

In Example 2, I pass one array that contains all the variables. It allows me to add variables as needed just by adding them to the array. However, with one array that contains ALL the variables for the site, it's a big array. Not all the variables are used by every function, but I never have to keep track of which of them each function needs because they are all in the array.

Example 2 is easier to for programming, but I'm wondering which is better for site performance.

You may see a slight performance gain by accessing individual variables. I would worry about it and do what ever is easiest for coding and readability.