NetTuts.com has continued their series covering common design patterns and their implementation in some example PHP scripts today. In their latest post they focus on the Facade pattern, a member of the "structural" family of patterns.

When it comes to design patterns, you may have questions: Why should we use design patterns in programming? Our code can work just fine without it. [...] Code that employs design patterns is easy to understand, easy to maintain, and easy to extend.[...] In this tutorial, we are going to cover the facade design pattern. It falls under the category of structural patterns because it deals with how your code should be structured to make it easily intelligible and keep it well maintained in the long term.

They start with a UML layout of a typical Facade and include a typical problem/solution where it could be used. They get into a code example that creates a simple checkout process. In this process, they use the Facade pattern to create a more maintainable, extensible ordering workflow.