One of the most structured and coherent sources about the best PHP practices is “PHP the Right Way” Repository. We will talk about the most commonly-used ones and the principles they fulfill.
Principle #1: Focusing on clear coding
Easy-to-follow, readable code optimizes time and space. The following methods can be used to do this:
Using proper naming conventions
Separating blocks of code within a single section into paragraphs
Avoiding long functions
Using the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle
Avoiding long lines
PHP best practices improving the code clarity:
Dependency Injection: a technique that reduces coupling between classes and their dependencies, removing a client’s knowledge of how those dependencies are implemented. Consequently, the code becomes more maintainable, testable, and reusable.
Code Style Guide: a set of guidelines or rules aimed at helping programmers understand and read source code in a consistent way and avoid bugs.
Design Patterns: a set of methods for solving problems that most often happen in software development. Developers can tailor each pattern to fit their specific code issues because it is basically a blueprint.
Database abstraction layers: packages for communicating between computer applications and databases.
Principle #2: Making sure the code is testable
Despite being understandable and clear, your code can still be untestable. The untestable code makes life so much harder than it needed to be! And it may result in undetected bugs, issues, and errors.
And so here are the principles your team can follow to avoid it:
DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) – eliminating redundancy by replacing repetitive software patterns with abstractions or by using data normalization.
KISS (Keep It Sweet and Simple) – prioritizing simplicity when developing code and at all costs avoiding overcomplications.
PHP best practices improving the code testability:
Test-driven development: The process of converting software requirements into test cases before the software is completed.
Dependency injection: (read in the previous section)
Principle #3: Producing an easy-to-maintain code
Code that is maintainable means you can revisit it later to make some changes or reuse some parts of it without breaking everything down. If you plan to scale your development in the future, this is a crucial milestone.
Leaving comments, writing easy-to-modify code, consistently checking for errors, and, when possible, writing less code are the keys to maintainability.
PHP best practices that will help you produce maintainable code are dependency injection, design patterns, and database abstraction layers (that we have described above).
Principle #4: Make daily backups a habit
Code can be lost due to multiple factors (such as system crashes, dead batteries, software glitches, hardware damage, and internet breakdowns.) Make sure you save your code daily and after any significant change.
PHP best practices/tools that will help back up your info:
Git: tool for tracking and managing changes to code.
Automatization of databases backup