I'm new to PHP in a professional context. I want a few macro thumb rules to keep me on the enlightened path. Here are a few I'm proposing to myself: no absolute paths in include|require(_once)? statements no .. dirname(foo), or other means of walking up in include|require(_once)? statements put libs on the include path, not in subdirectories You can see that all of this is focusing on managing dependencies, because that is the problem I've encountered thus far. What other thumb-rule solutions to macro level problems do you have?