PHP5 offers some interesting features like overloading and the ArrayAccess interface. You can abstract your configuraton with them so everything looks like regular objects or arrays.
Code:
$someConfig = new XMLConfig('sample.conf');
echo $someConfig->attr0;
$someConfig->attr1 = 'blahblahblah';
$someConfig->update();
Or if you don't use php5:
Code:
$anotherConfig = new SQLConfig($sqllink);
echo $anotherConfig->getAttr('attr0');
$anotherConfig->setAttr('attr1', 'asdf');
$anotherConfig->update();