DevShed has posted the first part of a two part series today looking at the use of static members and methods in classes in your PHP5 scripts.
Static properties and methods can be quite useful in a range of situations, not merely for constructing a Singleton class. This article, the first in a two-part series, introduces the basic concepts of static properties and methods, using plenty of hands-on examples.
Hopefully, by the end of this series you should be equipped with a decent knowledge of how to include static members and methods within your PHP applications with minor difficulties.
They start with a simple example of using both in a class before moving on to using the Singleton pattern working up to making a Factory for creating static objects.