I’ve made too many websites where variables have been hardcoded, down the road you need to change a path or info and you end up having to edit 5 or 10 files to achieve the desired result.

Recently I was faced with a decision between loading variables at runtime from a db or creating a single PHP file that contained all the constants/varaibles that could be changed.

After giving it a bit of thought I opted to go with db stored variables as I believe the more settings that can be changed from the frontend, the better. — Makes your site administrators be able to control more things without banging down the doors of the IT department.