On WebSpeaks.in today there's a recent post that introduces you to something more and more applications are using - especially frameworks - method chaining in PHP OOP apps.

In this article we will learn an advanced OOPS programming concept in PHP known as Method chaining. If you have worked on PHP frameworks like Zend, Magento or CakePHP, you might have noticed a very convinient style of accessing methods of different classes. [...] This type of programming technique is known as method chaining. If you are thinking how is it possible to perform this chaining, then don't worry. Today we will learn this fancy concept.

They create a simple class, a Person, and show the difference between calling several methods on the created object versus a method chained example that calls all three, making updates to the object itself ($this). There's also a bit more complicated example with three different classes in the mix.