Best way to control global settings in a site?

[Eiolon]

I have a global settings section where they can control the site name (which is shown on the title bar and footer) and URL as to where the app is installed.  This way they can change things on the fly.  I am wondering if there is a better way to do it.

 

Currently, I have a query on each page that calls for the settings and I am not sure if this is effecient to do.

 

Example:

 

$query_global_settings = "SELECT * FROM global_settings";
$global_settings = mysql_query($query_global_settings) OR die ('Cannot retrieve global settings.');
$row_global_settings = mysql_fetch_assoc($global_settings);

 

<title><?php echo $row_global_settings['site_name']; ?> - User Management</title>

 

Any suggestions on how to approach this or is what I am doing okay?

[premiso]

I would make them constants.

 

$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($global_settings);
foreach ($row as $key => $val) {
      define($key, $val);
}

 

You can make them strtoupper since constants tend to be in CAPS for easy recognizing. At least that is how I would do it.

 

define

 

This:
<title><?php echo $row_global_settings['site_name']; ?> - User Management</title>

Becomes:
<title><?php echo site_name; ?> - User Management</title>

 

EDIT:

Removed the while loop, noticed it was not needed.