I will give AF post rights here, some of you might think he is a bit of a challenge to work with.. and I'm not really excluding myself here. But he likes to work on the site and as the guy with the highest postcount he could actually get this forum more active.
Anyway, I'm going to propose a small change to the site code that handles database connections. This is not highly critical code nor is there any real diffrence in vision with me, Fnordia or AF on its implementation. AF has even already made a patch that implemented most of the work. I just like to see how a more structured development process works out in practice.
So bare with me here.
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Plan: Abstract database configuration details
Description
I like to abstract the way the site sets up a database connection so it's harder to acedently commit real passwords to svn and to make the code more exchangeble with the production and development environments without accidentally making connections to the wrong database back-end. (e.g. prod. env. connecting to the dev. env. database and visa versa.)
This would fit into the requirements of the "Webmasters" (that's the site developers (me, AF) and maintainer (Fnordia)).
Implementation
Have a file below www-root contain the database connection details, this file would be read each time the site translation, messageboard, wiki or other part of the site needs to set up a db connection.