On his Code in PHP site *Sarfraz Ahmed * has a post talking about coding to interfaces, how its done and why he thinks it's an essential part of any application.

One of the nicest things you can add to your programming skills is coding to interface.

One of the nicest things you can add to your programming skills is coding to interface. One of the five principles of S.O.L.I.D is Dependency inversion principle which states: [...] High-level modules should not depend on low-level modules. Both should depend on abstractions [and] abstractions should not depend on details. Details should depend on abstractions.

He elaborates on this "pretty formal definition" with an example MySQL wrapper class used in a User class, making them tightly coupled to each other. He also points out the same with a `UserController. As a solution to this tight coupling problem, he suggests using dependency injection (inversion of control) to pass in instances of the classes rather than creating them internally. This still couples them, though a bit more loosely, so he suggests using an interface for the dependency instead of a concrete class. This way any number of potential classes could be passed in and the class internally knows how to use them.