This is a guest post by Tim, who has written on Jatecblog before. Tim runs Sacratee.

Since the release of object oriented programming in PHP, it has lead many people to write better and more efficient code, but still many programmers are unaware of this. I will show you a couple ways to make use of this not-so-new way of programming. Note, you must have PHP 5 to use the code below.

Modular System

With many new types of content management systems being created, it is no surprise people are making add-ons for them. This can be a pain if the CMS developer has not put in object oriented ways of streamlining the process of module development.

Below is some example code in which the user can easily add an item to a menu bar. First, the menu class the programmer of the application has implemented before hand:

myMod.php

As you can see, if makes the task much less tedious for the module developer.

Template System

Using PHP's OOP __ destruct method, we can easily have things run at the end of our script without specifically putting code there.

The above code would replace {name} with bob in template.html when outputted. Note, if you remove the reference to the class by overwriting $Template, that will call the __destruct method as well.

So there you go! A couple useful ways to use object oriented programming in PHP.