In his latest post, Jacob Santos talks about global functions and some of the dangers behind using them in your code (as per his own experience debugging with them in place).

When I develop in PHP and code functions, I always either place them in a file or place them at the top of the script. Well, this is more about C++ and how I totally freaked out my teacher, by breaking his paradigm of thought. You see, you can have a definition of a function at the top of the page and then code the body of the function later.

He soon discovered his problem in debugging the script - he was too used to having the global functions at the top (as in C++) and not mixed in with the code - or at the bottom of the script.

If there is something at least somewhat common about popular scripts that people use and extend, is that the functions are placed in organized manner. Reforming otherwise is a bitch and I remember rewriting the entire script anyway. You can't reform when you can't reuse anything.