Magento core_config_data not loaded in backend

Guest Author: Rico Neitzel, http://buro71a.de/

I sometimes have the following strange behaviour in Magento:

Config not loaded in Backend

1. I do have valid config entries in core_config_data Table
2. The backend in System -> Config doesn't reflect these config values from the table

On further investigation I saw that this usually only applies to the General Tab and the General Section.

My finding was astonishing! There had been a core_config_data Entry with the following data:

How did that happen?

I'm pretty sure that I accidentally clicked the "Add new row" Button in my SQL-Tool. That prefilled the fields with its (in SQL defined) default values. The main issue here is the default value for the path field: general

What did it do?

When Magento loads the configuration and applies the database config values this NULL value for general will overwrite all general/* settings and so the backend cannot find anything although it's stored in the DB.

How to solve it?

Dead simple: Remove that broken general entry from the core_config_data table and you're fine :-)