DevShed continues their look at the use of the member visibility functionality PHP5 offers in its classes with this new part of the series, a look at the private property.

One of the most useful features that was introduced into the improved object model of PHP 5 is "member visibility." It provides PHP developers with the ability to specify the level of access each data member of a class will have in the context of a given application.

They review the other two keywords (public/protected) before venturing on to the use of "private" to protect, but allow access to, methods and properties in a parent class.