Agreeing to the defined standards and coding rules is must in PHP development as it leads to high-quality coding and efficient output. Moreover, the professional web programmers have always been using PHP programming technologies with lots of struggles. PHP development consistently passes through a series of changes in varied aspects like the syntax or architecture. Also, each of the versions brings in new features, quirk techniques and hacks for which it becomes quite terrible for website owners and developers to keep track of the issues.

Here are certain coding rules and technical standards that you need to follow while developing a solution in PHP. These guidelines when followed well will help website developers or programmers to shine through and make a difference between just a technically okay code and a mature well-advanced solution.

Rule 1: PHP Coding need Naming Conventions

One of the crucial conventions in PHP is providing names to the functions, variables as well as other codes. By names, it means relevant and contextually matched names with grammatically correct and sensible wordings. Further, you should try to keep words separated with an underscore as that makes code easy to read and understand later.

Rule 2: Right approaches for documentation

In PHP, you’ll always have to try all proper coding styles and approaches to make the documents easily readable and flexible for edits. Managing comments, content indentation, white spacing, proper line lengths, etc. are some of the best coding practices. While comments give the scope to developers to state the purpose or logic behind using the code, indentations provide the code hierarchy clearly and make readability and debugging easier.

Rule 3: No use of short tags or any shortcuts in coding

While to accelerate the time for development, many programmers use short tags or shortcuts in coding, that’s strictly restricted. That results in parsing issues with the XML parsers or may cause compatibility issue with other PHP versions. Thus, be careful to always use complete tags or shortcuts in coding to make it easily readable.

Rule 4: Turn error-reporting function on all the time

While PHP has some brilliant error reporting or debugging tools inbuilt to prevent any kind of glitches, many programmers are not aware of that. Error-reporting is a super easy and instantly responsive aspect in PHP programming which provides reports on all potential bugs and errors encountered in the development process. All you need is to keep the functionality turned on all the time.

Rule 5: Deep nesting is a strict no-no

Deep nesting is not at all a pleasant thing to achieve in PHP programming as it makes the job of debugging too much difficult and make ways for intruders to hack your data or site. Thus, it is extremely crucial that you use all the conditions rationally and avoid the idea of deep nesting totally.

To leverage a PHP framework to its best, you need to follow or maintain these specified rules or standards. Or else, you might find your site inconsistent, flawed or buggy. There are many other essential coding standards to add to the list though like avoiding the use of functions in loops, understanding strings, IDE for PHP coding, and use of the object-oriented approach.