30 PHP Best Practices for Beginners

PHP server-side programming best practices: more than 30 tips to help you improve your PHP basics

This article provides PHP beginners with more than 30 best practices to help you consolidate the basic knowledge of PHP. We have also written similar articles about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

1. Familiar with PHP manual

For PHP newbies, it is crucial to be familiar with the PHP manual. The PHP manual is detailed and each article is accompanied by practical notes. Before seeking help or solving your own problem, you might want to check out the manual first, and you may find the answer soon.

2. Enable Error Reporting

PHP's error reporting function is very practical. It can help you find some undetectable code errors, because not all errors will cause the program to stop running. You can choose different reporting rigors as you want.

9. Use meaningful and consistent naming conventions

A good naming is not only convenient for yourself, but also for others to read your code. Use clear class and function names and avoid meaningless naming.

10. Fully comment code

In addition to using spaces and indents to separate the code, you should also use inline comments to annotate the code. This helps you find code or recall the functions of a function in the future, and also facilitates others to read your code.

11. Install XAMPP/MAMP/WAMP

MySQL is the most commonly used database type for PHP (but not the only option). If you want to develop and test PHP applications in your local environment, consider installing MAMP (Mac) or WampServer (Windows). Installing MySQL by yourself can be cumbersome, and both packages contain a simple installer for MySQL.

If you need a cross-platform solution, you can also consider using XAMPP. It is the most popular PHP development environment at present.

12. Set time limit for scripts

It is crucial to set time limits for PHP scripts. When the script fails to run, the set_time_limit() function can set the maximum number of seconds for the script to run (the default is 30 seconds). Exceeding this time limit will cause a fatal error.

13. Using Object Oriented Programming (OOP)

Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) uses objects to represent various parts of an application. OOP not only breaks the code into independent logical parts, but also reduces code duplication and makes the code easier to modify.

14. Do not use phpinfo()

phpinfo() Although the function is convenient to view the server configuration, it is very unsafe to place it directly in the webroot directory. If the server is hacked, this will bring huge security risks.

20. Try using Object Relationship Mapping (ORM)

If you are writing object-oriented PHP code, you can use object relational mapping (ORM). ORM allows you to convert data between a relational database and an object-oriented programming language. In short, ORM allows you to manipulate databases like classes and objects in PHP.

There are many ORM libraries for PHP, and some PHP frameworks (such as CakePHP) also have ORM built-in.

21. Cache database driver pages

Caching database driven PHP pages can significantly improve script loading speed and performance. Creating and retrieving static content files is not difficult with functions such as htmlspecialchars() or str_contains().

32. Follow modern security practices

PHP is constantly enhancing security, which means that the methods used in the past may no longer be the best choice. This applies to all aspects of the language, especially in terms of security.

You may come across some outdated tutorials that may use old MySQL functions to access the database. The original MySQL extension has been replaced by MySQLi, and you can also choose to use preprocessing statements. Safe and dedicated functions should also be used to store and verify passwords.

33. Reducing the number of database queries

Reducing the number of database queries can significantly improve the performance of PHP scripts. Tools like Strace (Unix) and Process Explorer (Windows) can be used to find redundant processes and how to merge them.

34. Don't be afraid to seek help

Seeking help is an effective way to learn. You can ask experienced PHP developers questions using platforms such as forums, IRC or StackOverflow.

There is a page on the PHP website about getting PHP help.

This article has been updated and includes Monty Shokeen's contribution. Monty is a full-stack developer who loves writing tutorials and learning new JavaScript libraries.

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