The lack of function overloading is one of my biggest complaints about PHP. If you’re not familiar with overloading, its a feature of some languages that allows you to defined multiple methods (or functions) with the same name, but taking different paramenters. In Java, for instance, methods are not identified solely by their name. Instead, functions are distinguished by their signature: their name, return type, number of parameters and their types. This allows you to do things like define multiple constructors for a class.

PHP not being a typed language, using parameter types and return types as part of a method or function signature is out of the question. You could, however, use the number of parameters. In my opinion, you should be able to do something like this:

class Foo {
	function __construct()
	{
		//constructor that takes no parameters
	}
	function __construct($param1)
	{
		//constructor that takes 1 parameter
	}
	function __construct($param1, $param2)
	{
		//constructor that takes 2 parameters
	}
}

If you did this, however, you would get an error message reading something like this: Fatal error: Cannot redeclare Foo::__construct. As unfortunate as this is, it is possible to devise a simple workaround, due to the fact that a method can be written to take an arbitrary number of parameters. The solution is to create a method that can take any number of parameters and have that method delegate to ‘helper’ methods:

class Foo {
	public function __construct()
	{
		$args = func_get_args(); //any function that calls this method can take an arbitrary number of parameters
		switch(func_num_args())
		{
			//delegate to helper methods
		case 0:
			$this->construct0();
		break;
		case 1:
			$this->construct1($args[0]);
		break;
		case 2:
			$this->construct2($args[0], $args[1]);
		break;
		default:
			trigger_error('Incorrect number of arguments for Foo::__construct', E_USER_WARNING);
		}
	}
	private function construct0()
	{
		//constructor that takes no parameters
	}
	private function construct1($param1)
	{
		//constructor that takes 1 parameter
	}
	private function construct2($param1, $param2)
	{
		//constructor that takes 2 parameters
	}
}

It might not be pretty, but using this method you will be able to call the constructor of Foo as if it were actually overloaded:

$x = new Foo();
$y = new Foo(1);
$z = new Foo(1, 2);

An alternative to this would be to use default parameters to determine what action to perform, but this method gets increasingly clumsy as the number of arguments grows.