The TutsPlus.com site has posted a new tutorial for the WordPress developers out there showing you how to get started with namespacing and autoloading in your WordPress installation.

Namespaces and autoloading are not topics that are usually discussed when it comes to working with WordPress plugins. Some of this has to do with the community that's around it, some of this has to do with the versions of PHP that WordPress supports, and some of it simply has to do with the fact that not many people are talking about it. And that's okay, to an extent.

Neither namespaces nor autoloading are topics that you absolutely need to use to create plugins. They can, however, provide a better way to organize and structure your code as well as cut down on the number of require, require_once, include, or include_once statements that your plugins use.

The article then starts in by listing the things you'll need to have installed and working to follow along. It then talks about what they're going to help you build - a simple plugin that adds an "Inspirational quotes" widget to your post editor page. They walk you through the basic setup of the plugin, adding the box to the page and setting up the "questions.txt" file to pull the quotes from. Code is provided for each step including the creation of the "quote reader" class and the class to display the meta box.