OK, so you've heard all about it, you think you've got your head around it. Everyone you speak to says it's the way real developers develop. How do you do it? What's in it for you? And how the hell do you do it with PHP?

Broadly speaking, all of the above statements are true, but I guess if you're not familiar with OO you want to see a concrete example - and ideally something, which you can fit into your own page(s). Well, here goes.

Let's start off by seeing exactly what we're aiming for.

Basically, we have three boxes (F1 Teams, Drivers Championship and Constructors Championship).

Quite simply, this is a box with an un-ordered list in it. Each item is a link to the Team's web site.

This is an informational box, showing the current points standing in the F1 Drivers Championship. There are no links within this box.

Like the Drivers Championship box, this is also an informational box, showing the current points standing fo the F1 Constructors Championship.

Now, before you say it, I know you probably don't want details on the current F1 championship, but this does serve as a sample application. At the end of the day, the data is simply taken from a database (in this case I am using MySQL), so you can use whatever data you like. The point is these boxes are "great" portal-type tools for showing lots of focused data. Whether you are a fan of them or not, they do work.

In my mind there are a number of ways we can create these:

As you've probably guessed, we're going with the OO method. What would be the point otherwise?

Setting the requirements. For the purpose of this exercise, I'm going to define my requirements as:

There are a number of ways we can meet these criteria; and for the latter two, it is probably easiest to make use of CSS, which is what we'll do. As for the first two, so the story begins:

To build this box we are going to use 7 separate files:

All .obj files are class declarations. I use one file per class/subclass. The .phtml file is the file we are gong to insert our box(es) into. The .inc file is a generic server side include file and the CSS file is exactly that - a Style Sheet.