PHPComplete.com has a new posting the discusses something that every programmer out there has to worry about at one time or another - over engineering their code.

It's common for developers to want to experiment with different ways of developing. Certain ways speed up the process and other ways help maintenance of the code. But in the end, the only real judge of whether a process is worthwhile or not is the end result, and the user of that result.

[...] And this is where the real danger lies. Most frameworks do something and do it very well. The authors work to make sure of this, and if the developers using this framework use it correctly, the framework will do it's job well. ">The problem is when you have to go beyond the framework. Then one of two things happen. Either the framework authors have attempted to foresee this, and have included something to handle what you need. However, this smells of feature creep (and it usually is). So now you have a framework doing more than it should, and development becomes more difficult.

">"Feature creep" is one of the most notorious things to happen to someone's code. It can make even the best project turn into spaghetti if you're not careful. There's that fine line that you have to walk sometimes...