Published September 27th, 2004 by Jim O'Halloran
PHP Best Practices
Of course now that I have a functioning news aggregator again, I’ve got a few useful bits and pieces to point to! Devshed has another useful article on Best PHP Practices.
So I thought it would be useful to everyone to know what I consider to be the best practices while developing PHP. There are many PHP editors out there; trust me I’ve used just about all of them, from full blown “what you see is what you get� editors, all the way to those that are a Windows notepad clone. So I plan on filtering out the best from the worst. On top of that I’m going to be telling you all about the best programs for working with HTML and MySQL
The author advoctes using a few different tools and a bit of planning to make your PHP coding much easier.
When designing (especially database design) any app of a significant size, one thing that I’ve found over the years is that I can’t do it on a computer. I find I need to have the whole thing in front of me where my eyes can roam across the entire design and see whats missing. I use either a large artists sketch pad or a whiteboard for the job, and they work well for me.
The other thing which is essential is to have some sort of specification document. This doesn’t need to be anything elaborate, but it has to list all of the key functions and features required. When knee deep in coding an application its easy to miss or forget some features, so a specification can serve as an important memory aid!