Re: My preferred way of handling config data in Perl is:

[mr_mischief]

I've been use'ing Perl modules for configuration a bit lately. It's almost like hard-coding, but it's in a different file and I make a hash for each feature group that is kind of self-documenting.

It might not be the most user-friendly, but I tend to use these for things like configuring database names and hostnames, then stick user-level configs behind an options interface within the user interface.