It’s not just about the code. Coding Standards are an important factor for achieving a high code quality. However, not all important factors can be covered by rules and coding standards. Coding standards vary greatly among developers. Even when writing the same code. And therein lies the problem. This becomes most evident when reviewing code that is not your own.

You need to constantly improve yourself in this ever-changing industry; you need to learn and use new knowledge every day.

A developer should know frameworks, platforms you must be writing for and new trends you should be keeping an eye on.

What successful developers have in common, is that they care about programming a lot, they are professionals treating good programming practices as a form of art.

PHP is probably the most popular web development language right now that can achieve the same objective in multiple ways.  PHP Development is quite easy and fun to work at.

Here are a few tips that should help you to be a good PHP developer:

• Using classes (or Objects) will keep like things together and remove the repetition of code and perform basic tasks of production very easily.
• To start your script, avoid using <? ?>. While these may work on your server, they might not work on another server if you ever decide to run your script elsewhere.
• Always give your variables name that mean something to you.  This especially important since we do not specify a type when declaring a variable in PHP.
• Using a config file is a popular web application pattern that makes your code more modular and easier to maintain.
• When building your application, leave error_reporting and display_errors turned on to see run-time errors that will help you quickly identify where errors are coming from.
• Don’t Over-Comment Your Code. Comment the complicated parts of your source code so that when you revisit it later you’ll quickly remember what’s going, but don’t comment simple things.
• A good PHP developer should possess knowledge of making use of a composer package.
• Design patterns are something a good PHP developer should know. In order to solve issues with designs, these default structure solutions called design patterns are used.
• Using a framework forces you to use better web development patterns. It gives you a standardized platform for building web applications.
• PHP has many built-in functions that can do what you need them to, so check out the manual to make sure you are doing it in the best way possible.

The tips above should help you write neater, shorter and more organized code.

It is important for a good developer to be well versed in coding which can be achieved by coding themselves rather than reading or watching someone else code. Coding should be done for some piece of project in which the developer is completely interested in.