Global issue

Hi, I am including a config.php from an external file into the system. The problem is that none of the variables from the config.php is available in the system.

The config.php contains variables like:

$image_type = 'jpg';

$download_count = 10';

The page inside elgg, I tried to retrieve the variables by using:

global $image_type, $download_count;

echo $image_type;

That does not show any result. Any help would be greatly appreciated.