In a new tutorial posted on the Zend Developer Zone today Steve Hollis looks at something several PHP developers have said they want to seen in the language - traits - and how, until then, you can use traits now (well, sort of).

So why do we need traits, anyway? PHP is a single inheritance language, meaning that each class can only extend one other. This allows us to build logical class hierarchies which extend functionality in a "vertical" way. [...] What we need is a means of re-using code other than simple inheritance. That's where traits come in. Traits are classes containing a collection of methods, usually relating to a particular behaviour.

He shares a way that you can mimic some of the functionality that traits would give you (full code is available here) with an abstract trait class, reflection and a "superclass" that's extended to pass off the requests to the correct child object.