Settings should be separate from the modules

Ideally, the settings should be a separate settings.php or xml whatever possible. I have edited my site's blog and album php files heavily to make them do what I want and as soon as I upgrade to the next version whenever it comes, my settings will be gone. So I am preparing a list of the files I am editing side by side to avoid such a scenario. If Pluck had a separate settings page where there were sections for pages, blog module, album module and whatever other modules are there in the pipeline, I would need to worry about only one file. So let's say in the blog module I decide after how many characters I want to truncate my posts, after how many posts or days or a combination (whichever is earlier) does a post go into archives, after how many posts does a second page get generated so there aren't too many posts per page; in the album module I decide how many pictures should there be in one page, how many rows and columns do I want in the album, what size do I want the thumbnails and the large pics to be, how many sub-albums do i want etc.; in the pages the user can add/edit pages, add sub-pages give SEO friendly titles to the pages/subpages (can we have Pluck creating pages named index.php?about_pluck.php instead of index.php?kop4.php)?