Mathias Verras has a new post to his site about an idea he calls "named constructors". This method uses static factory methods to simulate the idea of a constructor and initialize the object.

PHP allows only a single constructor per class. That’s rather annoying. We’ll probably never have proper constructor overloading in PHP, but we can at least enjoy some of the benefits. Let’s take a simple Time value object. Which is the best way of instantiating it? The only correct answer is “it depends”.

His example shows the typical constructor creation with variable arguments, but points out that this can get messy quickly. His other method, the factory methods as "constructors", can make for a cleaner interface and makes the class more flexible. They make the object able to be initialized with different types of values and even satisfies the Single Responsibility Principle. He goes through a few examples using his "Time" class, showing how different "constructor" methods can be used to handle inputs ranging from a normal hour/minute format out to a "from minutes since midnight" value.