On the Mayflower blog today there's a new tutorial posted about creating coding standard "sniffs" for the PHP_CodeSniffer tool. A "sniff" is what defines the rules for your coding standards to follow (like "curly braces after function definitions should be on the next line" kinds of things).

In some cases the pre-installed coding standards like PEAR or Zend might not be sufficient for our current project or we want to deviate. This is the moment when we want to be able to create a custom one that fits our special needs. In this article I want to share my first experiences with you about how to create a custom coding standard for PHP_CodeSniffer.

They get into the details of what a "sniff" is and shows where they belong in the current structure of your PEAR install. There's an example of how to run the command line tool and how to create your own structure for your own custom sniffs. Their first example sniff checks to ensure that the first letter of a class is in uppercase.