Over on DevShed today, there's a new article posted in an effort to get PHP coders out there to think about application development the "right" way - PHP Application Development Part One.

Settling for the "quick and dirty" solution often costs far more time than it saves. This is as true of PHP coding practices as anything else. In this first article in the series, you will learn practices that will save you time and headaches in the long run, and help you write better PHP code.

Of course, there are all sorts of bad conventions that it's all too easy to get into when working on a new PHP application, and they spotlight a few of these, including the use of a well-organized directory structure, studlyCaps versus the underscore method of file naming, and, of course, meaningful varaible/function naming (no more $foo for you young man!).

Quite a bit of this article is commom sense for anyone that's been developing PHP applications for any good amount of time. It does surprise me, though, that I can almost sympathize with new coders in their thinking of "well, it can't hurt just this one time..." Trust me, it can, and it will - do it enough and it will come back to bite you in a bad way. I'd definitely recommend this article to anyone out there looking to really take a good, honest look at getting into PHP development...