The StarTutorial.com site has continued their series covering common design patterns and their implementation in PHP. In their latest article they cover the Template Method pattern.

[This pattern] defines the skeleton of an algorithm in a method, deferring some steps to subclasses. Template Method lets subclasses redefine certain steps of an algorithm without changing the algorithm’s structure.

In their example, they have two workers that have different schedules but with one difference. Instead of having implementations that differ widely between the two workers (represented by classes) they refactor the main class and allow for a doWork method to be defined in the child. This makes the parent class a sort of "template" for handling the processing with the child filling in the blanks.