ZendCon: Best Practices
I found three useful ideas in the PHP Developer Best Practices tutorial by Matthew Weier O’Phinney (Zend Technologies, Ltd.), Mike Naberezny (Maintainable Software):
- Add something like PHP_CodeSniffer to pre-commit in Subversion to reject code that doesn’t follow standards
- Run tests in a Subversion post-commit script
- Try to switch to git, because you can also do commits when offline
Sadly, there were also less good ideas like
- Prefix private/protected class methods and properties with an underscore (makes refactoring very difficult; instead you should start with all properties being protected anyway and only make properties public, that need to be public)
- Limit line length to 85 chars (120 chars are ok – nobody uses a 80 char text console for coding anymore – wide screens are standard, even for developers)
- Use PHP_CodeSniffer (I like ZendCodeAnalyzer)
Look at this, if you wanna see bad practices:
