Dreamweaver PHP connection vs. My manual connection?

Question

I have seen what Dreamweaver (I am using CS6) can do for PHP development, and find it to be a great help. I am trying to understand how to work with files that I have hand coded and created a database connection via constants that live in a config file. My database class uses them as the values for its connection. I see that when you create a database in Dreamweaver you get a file that seems to be what dreamweaver needs to recognize it as a connection. Should I leave this inplace and try to work with what I have or should I try to remove or configure it to be the only connection? It does not seem to hurt anyting to leave them both but I don't want to be missing out on features because I am not using best practices. I can't seem to find any documentation on how to combine this Dreamweaver style connection with my manual connection. The code Dreamweaver makes is like this for it's database connection
<?php# FileName="Connection_php_mysql.htm"# Type="MYSQL"# HTTP="true"$hostname_photo_gallery_dw = "localhost";$database_photo_gallery_dw = "grocery_land_db";$username_photo_gallery_dw = "gladmin";$password_photo_gallery_dw = "bw46210";$photo_gallery_dw = mysql_pconnect($hostname_photo_gallery_dw, $username_photo_gallery_dw, $password_photo_gallery_dw) or trigger_error(mysql_error(),E_USER_ERROR); ?>
The way my PHP config file that my class uses it configured is like so:
<?php     // Database Constants    defined('DB_SERVER') ? null : define("DB_SERVER", "localhost");    defined('DB_USER')   ? null : define("DB_USER", "gladmin");    defined('DB_PASS')   ? null : define("DB_PASS", "bw46210");    defined('DB_NAME')   ? null : define("DB_NAME", "grocery_land_db");?>
Thanks for any knowledge.

Answer 1

Your existing approach will  work fine going forward - the only difference you will see between the two is that the DW approach actually MAKES a persistent connection with the database (using the mysql_pconnect() command) and throws an error if that connection fails. I assume you are doing that later in your code....