NYCPHP Meetup

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Hi everyone,

I've been making steady (if slow) progress with my understanding of
PHP/MySQL, but now that I'm finally starting to do more complex things,
I find that I really need to figure out a consistent naming convention &
coding style. I've read several articles on the subject and they all
seem to be different.

Is there a de facto professional standard, or is it just whatever you
personally prefer (provided that you're not part of a larger team with
specific guidelines)? So far I'm doing the following:

-Functions are all lower case, no numbers, underscores used to separate
words
-Variables (same as functions--should they be different?)
-Constants and MySQL reserved words & functions are all upper case
-Classes... I'm not that advanced yet!
-Plenty of comments to help me remember what the code was for
-Tabs for indentation
-No echoing HTML code except where moving between it and PHP is too messy
-Stick with single quotes for string literals where there are no
variable substitutions and/or where there ARE variable substitutions,
but where using double quotes would necessitate lots of escaping

Two things I've read about that I don't do are 1.) put spaces before &
after the string concatenator, and 2.) keep my opening/closing braces on
their own lines.


//I find it much easier to read:

if ($foo == '') {
    echo '<p id="message" class="error">'.$message.'</p>';
} else {
    echo '<p id="message" class="success">'.$message.'</p>';
}

//Than:

if ($foo == '')
{
    echo '<p id="message" class="error">' . $message . '</p>';
}
else
{
    echo '<p id="message" class="success">' . $message . '</p>';
}

Are any of the things I'm doing/not doing a major no-no? It's not too
late for me to unlearn bad habits, so I'd really appreciate any advice
you could give.

Thanks,

Bev