OOP - yes, I know. This has been discussed before, and lengthy and in depth. Just look at the old IRC logs. But! One never stops learning, and thinking about something a bit longer sometimes helps. So this is what I'd like to see in the future.

We have a core MGW class. It sets up Smarty, ADOdb, rights and settings in it's constructor, and makes them class variables. Plus all the stuff that is in $appconf and related variables will be in class variables of the MGW class.

Then make all modules classes that subclass the core class. No need for globals any longer, standard methods are readily available.