When a business goes to hire a PHP developer or a team of PHP developers from offshore destinations or for in-house recruitment, it becomes mandatory to judge the quality and capability of the PHP programmer. To keep the PHP coding standards in constant attention, each developer should hang the list on a wall in front of eyesight.
Technically, every PHP developer coding, but quality coding comes by following coding standards and best practices of programming prevailing in the industry. Quality code always easy to read, maintain, and comprehensive.
Any developer could work on your PHP project in future once if your developer or team followed the coding standards and best practices. When you list PHP coding standards, it paints a common PHP development style, and it is mandatory to follow it for all PHP developers working on a project or in a team.
Therefore, your coding guideline document must be on a single page.
Once a PHP developer in Perception System has asked a senior developer that, where to begin reviewing code of a PHP development project to decide whether it is up to standards or not. In the answer, the PHP team leader has prepared the following list for the entire team.
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Look-n-Feel of Code
The beauty of code is in its organized structure or code formatting and standard layout. The following are general considerations to make standard look-n-feel of the PHP code.
• PSR standards are excellent, and PSR-2 is the best to follow for code formatting.
• Follow standard practices cited in PSR standards for indentations and line formatting to make code decent, readable, and easy to understand its logic, syntax, and comments.
• The nice name is a nice thing in code, and meaningful names make code readable, manageable, stable, and secure.
• Use appropriate English words for class, methods, comments, variables, database table, and secure code.
• Vendor namespace is base for namespaces and packages keys, as it provides seamless integration of 3rd party packages and eliminates needs of central package key registry. So, use own vendor namespace for long-run benefits.
• There are certain rules for namespace and class names in PSR standards, and you must follow it.
Parameters for Code Reviews
According to ISO 25000 Square Standards, eight parameters are for different code-review criteria to cover quality aspects of the PHP code, such as functional stability, maintainability, usability, security, efficiency, reliability, portability, and compatibility. Therefore, PHP developers must code the project documents keeping all in mind.
Keep Business Functionality at Center
We code for the business or client, and if we miss the adherence of our code and its logic to business functionality, the entire output becomes useless. Therefore, keep business logic or functionality at center and keep in touch with business analysts to verify it frequently.
Adhere to Framework Coding Guidelines
In most of the cases, PHP developers use a PHP framework for a project. Several known and useful PHP frameworks are prevailing in the market, and each has own coding standards to follow.
At present, Laravel, Zend, CodeIgniter, Yii, and CakePHP are trendy. Therefore, learn framework related guidelines and follow the best practices specified in framework documentation.
Respecting Object-oriented Principles
PHP has strong OOP fundamentals, and programmers should accustom to it. Those fundamentals are SOLID, DRY, YAGNI, and Law of Demeter.
Security Coding
Security is a sensitive issue with increased threats on the web. PHP resides as source code in more than half of total websites running on the world of the Internet. Therefore, PHP has rich security library, OWASP to apply security at the application level in PHP applications. So, keep PHP security checklist handy whenever you review security aspects.
Exception Handling in PHP Code
Exception or error handling is considering important aspect in the reliability of PHP application. Therefore, PHP developer must know exception handling practices.
Integration Protocol
Today, a lot of third-party integrations are carried out using various APIs. PHP has integration protocols or patterns, and PHP developers must follow its best coding practices. So, you PHP developer must have familiarity with it and best coding guidelines for APIs integrations.
Commit Messages
Automated generation of change logs for each release helps a lot to PHP programmer. Therefore, it is good practice to write commit message with a consistency. Commit messages have a defined syntax, and your dedicated PHP developers must know it.
Documentation Practices
PHP programmers must follow source code documentation like writing inline comments, documentation blocks used for the entity it precedes, and class documentation to illustrate aims of class.
Similarly, PHP developers should have familiarity with documenting variables, constants, include, methods, and test case documentation practices.
Use the Latest Version of PHP
Each new version of PHP comes with advanced features and fixes. Therefore, it is mandatory to use the latest version of PHP for your programming and implement best coding practices for it.
Keep Order of Methods
If we keep the order of methods in a certain way, we can gain a better overview of PHP code following order is used as the best practices.
1. Constructor
2. Injection
3. Initialization
4. Public
5. Protected
6. Private
7. Shutdown
8. Destructor
Conclusion
With each new release of PHP, the coding standards, and best practices also improving and your PHP developer must have familiarity and knowledge of each new updates as well as trends prevailing in PHP community.
If you save yourself from carrying extensive interviews with PHP developers from one company to another, Perception System is a right destination for you to rely on the PHP team for the latest knowledge and coding practices.
We deliver PHP projects with futuristic and high-end code using the latest and best coding standards as well as following the best coding practices or guidelines.
