Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

PHP 7.2 is on the horizon and one of the battles that we’re still facing is how to name our functions and classes. In WordPress, this is especially hard because we have to consider how our plugins and themes will be used in the global landscape.

Everything Must Be Unique

If you’ve written a self-contained PHP app, you know that you can’t give two functions the same name. So you have function enqueue_scripts and function enqueue_styles and function embed_content but you can’t declare them twice. Names must be unique within an app.

When you consider the fact that all plugins and themes are third-party add-ons to WordPress, the naming situation gets messier. You can’t, for example, use function get_the_excerpt() because WordPress is using it. So you have to introduce prefixes to your plugin (let’s call it “Caffeinated”) like this: function caff_get_the_excerpt()

That works well until someone creates an add-on to your plugin, call it “Decaffeinated”, and they need to use function decaff_get_the_excerpt() which isn’t so bad, but “Tea Caffeinated” has to either use a prefix of tea_caff_ or caff_tea_ and the more you travel down the road, the messier it gets.

Prevent Collisions

The whole point of this exercise in naming is, you see, to prevent collisions between your code and the parent projects you’re working with. You can’t use __ as a function prefix, for example, because that’s magical in PHP land. You can’t use wp_ or wordpress_ in WordPress, because … well. You’re not WordPress.

But preventing collisions gets long and messy and convoluted and you end up with prefixes like edd_stbe_ which is unique but can be difficult to remember what it’s for. That’s why, thankfully, we have the option of a little more selective naming.

Selective Uniqueness

Back in PHP 5, the object model was rewritten to allow for better performance and more features. And this allows us to make Classes which contain our functions, named whatever we want:

class Caffeinated {
    function get_the_excerpt() { ... }
}
new Caffeinated();

This is extended to the add-on plugins, So we could have class Decaffeinated and class Caffeinated_Tea but within the classes, our functions are more simply named. Also we can call functions from one class into another, like Tea could call Caffeinated::get_the_excerpt() and easily filter that function.

Why is this good? Well it lets you keep the function names simple, but the class name distinctive and thus easier to remember.

Simple Names are Better

One of the cardinal rules about domain names is that shorter is better. The same goes for functions and classes, to a degree. As Otto likes to say, a well named function doesn’t really need documentation. And one of the ways you can get a well named function is by putting it in a well named class. You can also use Namespaces.

Namespaces are magical. By adding namespace Caffeinated; to your plugin file, for example, you can then have a classname of class Settings and not have to worry about collisions, because your class name is prefixed automatically by the namespace. This extends to functions, as you can us function admin for admin settings in the Settings class, in the Caffeinated namespace. And to call that? Use Caffeinated\Settings::admin();

There’s a lot more you can do with Namespaces, of course, but using them to stop your code from crashing into other people’s, while still keeping names obvious, unique, and memorable? Well they’re pretty nifty.

Remember: What’s Your Global?

At the end of the day, the big thing to remember is what your globals are.

• Outside of a class or namespace, a function is a global.
• Outside of a namespace, a class is a global.
• Outside of a namespace, a namespace is global.

Yes, you can have sub-namespaces. But the point is that top-level whatever you pick, be it a function, class, or namespace, must be named uniquely and distinctly and, in my opinion, relative to the code it’s in. Naming things generically ends in tears as they’ll probably conflict.