php-best-practices

The PHP Best Practices skill provides comprehensive guidance for writing modern, maintainable PHP code following PHP 8.x standards. It addresses the common challenge of keeping PHP codebases aligned with evolving language features, PSR standards, and SOLID principles. By detecting the project's PHP version first, it ensures recommendations are compatible with the specific PHP version in use (8.0 through 8.5), preventing suggestions of unavailable syntax or features.

This skill contains 51 rules organized into 7 priority-based categories: Type System (9 rules), Modern PHP Features (16 rules), PSR Standards (6 rules), SOLID Principles (5 rules), Error Handling (5 rules), Performance (5 rules), and Security (5 rules). It covers critical areas like strict typing, constructor property promotion, match expressions, enums, readonly properties and classes, attributes, nullsafe operators, and version-specific features like property hooks in 8.4 and the pipe operator in 8.5.

The skill is designed for PHP developers conducting code reviews, implementing new features, refactoring legacy code, or ensuring code quality and type safety. It's particularly valuable for teams upgrading between PHP 8.x versions, as it provides clear feature availability tables showing which modern constructs are available at each version. Whether you're auditing existing code or writing new implementations, this skill helps enforce best practices while respecting version constraints.