In the Forums: Can’t Update Config Settings

In my talks last year at the EE Roadshow and EECI, I highlighted how you can make your config.php file more powerful and your site more portable by overriding settings values that are typically stored in the database (Jamie Pittock at Erskine also covered this in his great talk at EECI in San Francisco). But this behavior can come back to bite you if you don’t remember that you set the variables in the config.php file (or someone else did it before you).

A thread in the EE forums highlights this problem for the throttling settings:

I’m able to change the “Custom Message”, but whenever I try to change any of these 4 fields (Enable Throttling, Maximum Number of Page Loads, Time Interval (in seconds) & Lockout Time (in seconds)), I get a success message at the top of the screen but the field values don’t change from the defaults.

Any time you change a setting and it doesn’t take (the page reloads with the old setting), then the first thing you should look for is if that settings value is being set in the config.php file. If it is, either change it there or remove it and store it in the database.

(For an entire list of the config.php overrides, see this EE Insider Tip.)