The SitePoint PHP blog has a recent post where they dig into the details of the Chain of Responsibility design pattern, a commonly used structure that makes for easier workflow handling and encapsulation.

The Chain of Responsibility is a behavioral design pattern that processes a request through a series of processor (handlers/receivers) objects. The request is sent from one handler object to another and processed by one (pure implementation) or all of the handlers. All the handlers are part of the chain.

They get into the detail of the parts of the pattern first: the abstract handler that defines the structure and a set of concrete handler classes based on this structure. He also mentions a few other object types that could be involved including a Client, Request and Response objects. He includes an example of the base abstract handler class with "setSuccessor" and "handler" methods to provide the "chain" from one handler to another. He creates a more advanced version of the handler that does some additional checking on the handler results to see if it needs to continue. Finally, he gets down to the Client class that handles the ordering of the chain before processing. He also shows how a service container (dependency injection) could be integrated to manage creating object instances.