Coding Standards

In the PHP community, as well as every other development community, there has been a long-standing tradition of establishing 'Coding Standards' that specify how developers should format their code. So, the PHP Framework Interop(ability) Group came up with PSR-1 and PSR-2 that deal with the issue specifically.

Tools

Fabien Potencier (Sensio Labs) has released the PHP Coding Standards Fixer tool which fixes most issues in your code. It helps you follow the PHP coding standards as defined in the PSR-1 and PSR-2 documents.

• PHP Coding Standards Fixer website (code)
• Note that if you use NetBeans, there is a plugin that will integrate with this tool.

Greg Sherwood (Squiz Labs) is the maintainer of PHP CodeSniffer, which was originally a PEAR project. PHP_CodeSniffer is a PHP5 script that tokenises and "sniffs" PHP, JavaScript and CSS files to detect violations of a defined coding standard. It is an essential development tool that ensures your code remains clean and consistent. It can also help prevent some common semantic errors made by developers.

• Usage
• There is a sniff file for MediaWiki (see here) that you can use to conform to MediaWiki Coding Conventions

For users of Atom, the docblockr package makes it easy to write your Doxygen comments. Just press tab or enter after you begin typing a comment.

PHP is the HyperText Preprocessor = the most popular programming language for the web

PHP Standard Recommendation 1

PHP Standard Recommendation 2

PHP Extension and Application Repository = a collection of code started in 1999 to enhance the utility of PHP.

Cascading Style Sheets = A technology that deals with the presentation of content on the web