cold fusion to php conversion..

Quick newbie question.. I'm converting a cold fusion project to php. Cold fusion supports an 'application' structure by the inclusion of an application.cfm file. What this means is that this application.cfm file gets processed before any other .cfm file in that same directory, etc. Very useful for authentication, setting of global type variables, etc. I know that you can include files (require) via php, but does it have a similar function? Starting my first substatial php project, and for whatever reason couldn't find an answer to this. Thanks, Kelly Meeks