In his new post Allan MacGregor takes a look at a somewhat underused feature of PHP (since 5.4), traits. He talks about how they can help solve multiple inheritance issues and the power they can offer.

Languages like C++ or Python manage this problem by allowing inheritance from multiple classes, Ruby in the other hand uses Mixings to address this issue. Regardless of the technique the problem remains the same; Traits are another approach to this problem and are commonly used in the languages like Perl and Scala.

He includes an example of the standard PHP method for inheritance in classes via the normal "extends" handling. He refactors this into a setup using traits to "override" the single inheritance issues via a "Cat" trait included in the "Tiger" class providing the "roar" method inside the class context.

The best part about traits is that it makes sense from a structural point of view. [...] Traits are an incredible addition to the PHP language and we have only started to touch the surface.