I found what Appears to be a bug (or two) with initializing variables
in Drupal.
It is suggested that you can uncomment and set initial variable
values in settings.php with the $conf array. In doing so, and not
seeing my variables set when retrieving using variable_get, I
discovered that conf_init(), when called to initialize the configure
file path, it sets $conf to a string. I know that since it
initializes settings.php within the context it conceptually SHOULD
reset it to a variable, but it doesn't. I proved this by changing
the variable array name in settings.php, variable_get, variable_set,
variable_init and conf_init to $config_vars and the values I
initialized in settings.php were reflected when my application later
retrieved them using variable_get.
This bug is currently hindering the flexibility of an application
that I'm writing that will be deployed to different environments. I
initially tried to set the variables in the 'variable' table of the
Database in order to retrieve them with variable_get but that method
only accesses the cached variables in $conf (or in my case,
$config_vars. Is this on purpose? I see that variable_set will not
only set the cached variable but will also set into the database.
This seems to be a bug as well to me. Can someone clarify this for me?
Scott Matthews