An abstract class is a class that cannot (or should not) be instantiated. They are surprisingly useful for certain purposes. In this article, you will learn the important concepts related to abstract classes in PHP, and see many hands-on examples that will allow you to make use of them in your own applications.

Although PHP wasn’t originally conceived to include many object-oriented features found in full-fledged OOP languages, it has gone through different major rewrites. It now provides developers with a mature, rich language, which offers numerous improvements, particularly in an area known as Object Model. Admittedly, with the long-awaited release of PHP 5, the implementation of a powerful object model has dramatically changed the scenario most PHP programmers must tackle on a daily basis.

The introduction of strong object-based features, such as member visibility, interfaces, and exceptions –- to name a few -– has brought boosted capacities to all those developers wanting to take a deeper approach to using object-oriented programming. Generally speaking, one of the most interesting topics surrounding the object-based paradigm is the implementation of abstract classes inside of PHP applications, certainly a very useful concept when applied in the appropriate development context.