Note that while some of the practices hinted in the article are good, the article is over 5 years old and not all facts stated and practices preached in the art

Note that while some of the practices hinted in the article are good, the article is over 5 years old and not all facts stated and practices preached in the article are valid today; PHP has gone through dramatical changes since 2005. Just to mention one thing that stood out: "In PHP there are no database-independent functions for database access apart from ODBC (which nobody uses on Linux)." - PHP has since long had 3 abstraction layers available apart from ODBC (they are PDO, dbx and DBA).