In this new entry to his blog today, Chris Cassell shows how to create "magic methods" - ones that make use of overloading to do special things.

I've learned a lot of things from various open source frameworks, especially CakePHP. One of the most impressive things about Cake, and Ruby on Rails for that matter, is its magic methods in its data model class [...] I've implemented similar methods in the home-grown framework that I use at work. Here's how to do it.

In his example, he gives both the PHP4 and PHP5 code to make a simple magic method class with a __call() function to handle undefined method calls. Using this, he maps a undefined method call to another method in the class (called findAllByColor and mapped to findAll with the right parameters).