Monday, 27 May 2013

Managing settings in a web app

Managing settings in a web app

When creating a web app (let's say that for example, in Ruby on Rails), what would be a good way to manage the settings for the app? For example if the site is a social network, how would the name, tagline, logo etc. be set in an effective way?
One way that I'm thinking of would be a database table called "Settings" that would have a column for the name of the option, and another for the value. Something like this...
| SETTING | VALUE                              |
|==============================================|
| Name    | "Test site"                        |
| Tagine  | "Some terrible and cheesy tagline" |
| Logo    | "http://imgur.com/xyz.png          |
I don't know whether making an entire database table for just a couple of settings would be worth it (still, it's better than a .txt file). My question is this: When managing the settings for a web app, is it best to make a database with two columns (setting and value for example) with only a couple of rows, of would there be a more effective way of doing this.

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