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Documentation is King

Always document your code. There are no excuses.

I strongly recommend using PHPDoc format which is essentially the same as popular Javadoc. A sample (a vBMS port I'm working on):

/**
* Displays an error if a required field in a form was missing or empty.
*
* Searches through $fields, an associative array of form element names mapped
* to human-readable names, for elements that are not present in $_POST or $_GET.
* If one or more of the elements is missing, an informative error is displayed.
*
* @param fields array of fields for which to check
*
* @return void
*/
function vbms_checkrequiredfields($fields)
{
$missing = array();

foreach ($fields as $name => $humanreadable)
{
if (empty($_POST[$name]) and empty($_POST[$name]))
{
array_push($missing, $humanreadable);
}
}

if (!empty($missing))
{
vbms_scrubhtml($missing);
foreach ($missing as $key => $value)
{
$missing[$key] = "<li>$value</li>";
}
$missing = implode("\n", $missing);

eval(print_standard_error("error_vbms_missingfields"));
}
}

Always document your code. There are no excuses.

I strongly recommend using PHPDoc format which is essentially the same as popular Javadoc. A sample (a vBMS port I'm working on):

/**
* Displays an error if a required field in a form was missing or empty.
*
* Searches through $fields, an associative array of form element names mapped
* to human-readable names, for elements that are not present in $_POST or $_GET.
* If one or more of the elements is missing, an informative error is displayed.
*
* @param fields array of fields for which to check
*
* @return void
*/
function vbms_checkrequiredfields($fields)
{
$missing = array();

foreach ($fields as $name => $humanreadable)
{
if (empty($_POST[$name]) and empty($_POST[$name]))
{
array_push($missing, $humanreadable);
}
}

if (!empty($missing))
{
vbms_scrubhtml($missing);
foreach ($missing as $key => $value)
{
$missing[$key] = "<li>$value</li>";
}
$missing = implode("\n", $missing);

eval(print_standard_error("error_vbms_missingfields"));
}
}

What's the best way to document changes you make in Templates?

<!-- Comment -->
looks ugly. I would rather do

//comment
//comment

For templates, if really necessary, I would keep documentation of changes in a seperate file. <!-- Comments --> a) looks ugly, as you said yourself. b) can give a potential hacker more information than I'd like to share. c) increases load times.

Always document your code. There are no excuses.

It was hard to write ... it should be hard to read!










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