Many of the CSF libraries consist of a main class which has several options specific to an instance. A standard way of supplying these options has been adopted.

• Options are stored internally as an associative array of “option” ⇒ “value”
• Default values for these options are stored as part of the class definition, e.g.

  class CSF_Foo {
      private $_options = array(
          'option_1' => 'default',
      );
  }

• The constructor of the class takes a single argument, which is an array of options
• In the constructor, the supplied options are merged with the default options, so that any supplied options override their defaults:

  $this->_options = array_merge($this->_options, $options);

• After the options have been merged, any library-specific validation or sanitization of the options is performed

An example involving the dispatch library, where all controllers are stored in the “controllers” directory and are suffixed with “Controller”:

$dispatch = new CSF_Dispatch(array(
    'controller_path' => 'controllers',
    'class_suffix' => 'Controller',
));