Matthew Setter has posted five reasons why he thinks that making a coding standard is an essential part of your development process. He suggests that "pain avoidance" is one of the key factors, both for new members of the team and for those maintaining it in the future.

Whenever you're working on a project, are you consistent? Are you consistent in your coding style, consistent in your documenting, consistent in your database naming conventions? Better yet, do you and your team have a coding standard which you consistently adhere to? If you don't, you're buying yourself and others a world of pain - which is painlessly simple to avoid. Today I'm banging the drum, shouting from the street corner, calling from the cathedral spire, imploring you to do one thing, above all else - pick a coding standard and then BE CONSISTENT!

His five reasons for implementing (and effectively using) a coding standard are:

• Poor, Inconsistent Code - Causes You Pain
• Your Code is Easier to Read
• Your Code is Easier to Understand
• Your Code is Easier to Maintain
• Your Code is Easier to Collaborate on

Check out the post for summaries of each point.

On NetTuts.com today they've posted a good primer for those that may have heard about the PSR standards that have been introduced to PHP but aren't quire sure what they are (or what they mean to you as a developer).

If you're an avid PHP developer, it's quite likely that you've come across the abbreviation, PSR, which stands for "PHP Standards Recommendation." At the time of this writing, there are four of them: PSR-0 to PSR-3. Let's take a look at what these are, and why you should care (and participate).

They start with a brief history of the standards, the PHP-FIG (Framework Interoperability Group) and where the idea for the PSRs came from. Then the article gets into the details of each:

• PSR-0: Autoloader Standard
• PSR-1: Basic Coding Standard
• PSR-2: Coding Style Guide
• PSR-3: Logger Interface

They also do a good job mentioning some of the criticism that's come with the standards and what sort of future there is including the creation of a standard for a HTTP messaging package.

In a recent (controversial) post Richard Roger talks about why he's given up on coding standards and includes a few of the reasons that might make you think about your own proceses.

Every developer knows you should have a one, exact, coding standard in your company. Every developer also knows you have to fight to get your rules into the company standard. Every developer secretly despairs when starting a new job, afraid of the crazy coding standard some power-mad architect has dictated. It's better to throw coding standards out and allow free expression. The small win you get from increased conformity does not move the needle. Coding standards are technical ass-covering.

He walks through the evolution of the average developer, the trip from their infancy of "just writing code" to the point of understanding that there needs to be standards to make code easier to read and understand. He includes a list of five "sins of control" that might make coding standards more desirable.

There are worse sins than these. You only need one of them to end up with a coding standard. The truly evil thing about coding standards is what they do to your heart, your team's heart. They are a little message that you are not good enough. You cannot quite be trusted. Without adult supervision, you'll mess up.

As you'd expect, there's plenty of comments on the post, so enjoy reading and maybe contribute some of your own.

Brian Moon has shared some of his thoughts about the recently proposed standards (PSRs) from the PHP-FIG group based on some discussions had at this year's php|tek.

During the /dev/hell podcast at Tek12, someone asked the guys their opinion about PSR. [...] The person asking the question had asked about PSR1 and PSR2. These are the first two standards proposals in the group and they deal with coding standards. [...] There are already coding standards for PHP and any other language out there. Why does anyone need to make a new one? [...] This reminds me a lot of Open Source licenses. There are tons of these things. And in the end, most (GPL has its issues I know) of the open source licenses represent the same idea.

He goes on to talk more about the feedback he's gotten from other PHP community members about the target of the group and his thoughts on the naming of both the group and the standards they're generating.

In the end, cooperation is good. And if these guys want to cooperate I say more power to them. I just hope they get into really good things soon. Like, can we talk about a maximum number of files, functions or classes used for any one single page execution? *That* would be valuable to the PHP community.

As is mentioned in this new post to PHPMaster.com, the PHP standards group is officially in the voting process on two new standards (PSR-0 being the first) setting up some standard development practices for PHP applications - PSR-1 and PSR-2.

They initially started out as one proposal but the initial round of voting didn't yield a majority in favor. Participants did however see merit in various requirements the decision was made to split it into 2 proposals - one for mandatory interoperability and one for suggested style.

The PSR-1 standard proposes some basic coding standards (like namespacing structure and class/method naming definitions) and the PSR-2 standard covers similar things, but more in-depth with more recommendations.

If you want to find out how your application stacks up against this new standard, you can try out PHP-CS-Fixer (from Fabien Potencier) to see how many things need an update.

In the wake of the official release of PHP 5.4 Sebastian Marek has made a quick post to his blog about bringing PHP_CodeSniffer rules help bring his code up to date with this latest version.

So with PHP 5.3 upgrade underway (and PHP 5.4 out of the door now!) I thought it's time to prepare for PHP 5.4 and make sure we're compatible. So by looking at Wim Godden's PHP53Compatibility code sniffs I have created a base for PHP 5.4 sniffs that we want to use to make sure we're compatible.

Sniffs included in set are:

• PHP54Compatibility_Sniffs_PHP_BreakContinueVarSyntaxSniff
• PHP54Compatibility_Sniffs_PHP_DeprecatedFunctionsSniff

You can grab this custom set of sniffs either from his github repository or from his personal PEAR channel if you'd rather install it that way (alpha channel).

With all of the frameworks making their way around the PHP community, it's interesting to see different developers' takes on judging which is the best for their needs. In this new post to his blog Volker Dusch takes the opposite stance - he hates talking about frameworks.

I just hate talking about frameworks! But as it seems not many people share that feeling so this is an attempt to write a rather short and linkable post on how i approach a new framework and by what standards i judge it. [...] I'm not going to call any names in this post so no need to grab your pitchforks. (For some reason people seem to get really upset when you tell them you don't like the framework the use)

He asks himself a few questions like "can I still write code to my standards" and "how many 'positive adjectives' are used in the description" (inversely related to the quality of the project in his experience). He also talks about one of his other big requirements - being able to actually write unit tests for his code (i.e. the framework must make things testable).

Volker Dusch has a suggestion for all of the PHP projects (or, really Open Source projects in general) that can help keep things cleaner in your codebase and make for simpler times when merging contributions - including your coding standard along with the rest of your project.

Let me elaborate on [an important] point: Contribution. Most developers i know care about producing good code, especially then they are contributing to an open source project! Those people will respect your coding standard, naming scheme and every thing else that they can check for before sending you all patch/pull request. So try to make that part easy.

He talks about doing things the hard way - reformatting everything by hand each time someone contributes - or the easier way of enforcing the coding standard as a part of the contribution flow. He mentions PHP_CodeSniffer and the PHP Mess Detector as a part of a Jenkins installation (easily built from this handy project).

On the Mayflower blog today there's a new tutorial posted about creating coding standard "sniffs" for the PHP_CodeSniffer tool. A "sniff" is what defines the rules for your coding standards to follow (like "curly braces after function definitions should be on the next line" kinds of things).

In some cases the pre-installed coding standards like PEAR or Zend might not be sufficient for our current project or we want to deviate. This is the moment when we want to be able to create a custom one that fits our special needs. In this article I want to share my first experiences with you about how to create a custom coding standard for PHP_CodeSniffer.

They get into the details of what a "sniff" is and shows where they belong in the current structure of your PEAR install. There's an example of how to run the command line tool and how to create your own structure for your own custom sniffs. Their first example sniff checks to ensure that the first letter of a class is in uppercase.

On the Nefarious Designs blog today there's a new post looking at something that can be a key in the strategy of a development group - creating a coding standard.

In my time as a web developer, I have been involved in the definition, implementation, and maintenance of several different coding standards, across various web-based languages. In my experience, this process is not as straightforward as it first seems, and can lead to a great deal of headaches if not handled in a very specific manner.

He talks about why a coding standard is even important and some of the first steps you and your team can take towards creating them. He breaks it up into a few different sections:

• Comments
• Naming conventions
• Style (ex. tabs versus spaces)
• Already accepted standards
• Expressions
• Concerns over file size