What are some of the best patterns and practices for PHP development?

Question

I am mainly looking for good development practices specially when working in conjunction with mysql. I searched through the questions but could not find any related questions. I would appreciate if some one share their practices and wisdom gained through experience.

Apart from some coding standards, I am also looking for design standards and common architectural practices.

Background: I started my career with Java, and over the years I moved to C#/.NET space. I have been practicing architect for over 3 years now. Just added this to give some idea to people.

Answer 1

Zend Framework's "Coding Standards for PHP" is good starting point. Check also this post.

Answer 2

• Use a coding standard.
• Use unit testing. PHPUnit and SimpleTest are the major xUnit systems in PHP.
• Be object oriented.
• Use version control. Any version control, just use it.
• If applicable, use a framework. Zend, CodeIgniter, Symfony, and CakePHP are the major ones.
• If no framework, at least use an ORM. Propel and Doctrine are the major ones.
• Document. Heavily. Use PHPdoc or similar.

There are a wealth of tools out there for PHP. Please use them, and write good maintainable code. You'll make everyone happier.

Answer 3

Use PDO or mysqli. Using one of these will give you prepared statements, which are safer and more efficient. I can't believe how many examples and tutorials I see using the ancient mysql interfaces. PDO would also make it much easier to switch to a different database system, should you decide to try postgres for instance.

You might look into using Doctrine (http://www.doctrine-project.org). It has a bit of it's own learning curve, but provides very convenient functionality. The handiest parts, for me, are the table creation/test data loading functions. Personally, I prefer to write my own SQL and execute it with PDO, and not use an ORM much in production.

Mainly, learn about SQL and MySQL. http://www.kitebird.com/mysql-book/ this book is excellent. The PHP aspect isn't very intense; PDO takes care of most of it.

Answer 4

Your from a Java background, and much of the OO stuff in PHP is very Javaesque. This means many of the design patterns you (hopefully) learnt in Java also apply (to a lesser extent) in PHP. An example for database access would be the DataMapper pattern.