What PHP application design/design patterns do you use?

Question

Please share your favorite application design / design patterns for use in PHP with me. Some things I\'d like to know:

• How your folders are designed
• How y

Answer 1

I almost feel like a broken record, but I would recommend that you take a look at some of the common frameworks for two reasons:

1. Even if you choose not to use one, some of them are very well written and very well designed. I particularly like Zend Framework but I'll come back to that in a second.
2. Ask yourself why you're reinventing the wheel. Do you really feel that you understand the same design problems everyone else faces so much better than the community behind (insert framework of choice here) to justify writing something from scratch? Speaking as one who originally looked at several frameworks and decided that they were too big, presented too much of a learning curve or too much overhead and so developed my own, I can tell you that writing your own from scratch is a big pain if you can simply use an existing one that can be easily extended.

Speaking of using a framework that can be easily extended, I have had very positive experiences with Zend Framework. It's cohesive and yet loosely coupled structure makes it possible to quickly and easily extend any existing component and the entire framework is designed around the idea that you will need to write your own helper and plugin classes to add to its overall functionality.

I've found Zend Framework to be so completely flexible that I am running a single website as part Zend Framework MVC and part my old crappy framework and even older crappier code that I haven't gotten to rewrite yet. In fact, because during our rewrite we found one page that ran unacceptably slow using the old framework, I've switched the single page to run under the Zend Framework architecture.

To answer some of your questions, I would recommend that you look into Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler. He provides a lot of valuable insights into how to solve a number of these common problems like how to create a database interaction layer in your application. Fowler also covers topics like MVC and Front Page Controller.