I would love to take a good long look under the hood at just how PHP objects and classes do the work that they do, and hope that you could benefit from that knowledge. [There are] many questions that come across my desk, on a regular basis, from developers and beginner PHP enthusiasts that I've worked with over the years, and are some of the key points this article attempts to help you answer.

He talks about classes "giving birth" to objects, how they're stored internal to PHP and how they provide the "blueprints" for it to lay out the storage of the object's data. He talks about using identifiers for variable/property access, object handlers and how "$this" fits into all of it. He notes that OOP, while a major part of PHP now, wasn't in the initial versions (until around PHP4). He finishes off the post talking about lateral/vertical context switching, the lifecycle of an object and the "early binding problem" and class scope.

PHP programmers generally know what a good systems architecture should look like, but it is often a reality of development that they will have little input on the system itself until the last minute. In fact, it's far from uncommon for a developer to be faced with an off-the-shelf dedicated LAMP server, and left up to their own devices.

He recommends getting to know things like the package manager for your distribution (apt, yum, yast, etc), stripping down the modules your installation is using, check that all of the packages in use need to be enabled and ensure that the network connection is set up correctly and is what you need for the site.