Any time a software package opens itself up to third-party additions, there is a potential for mischief. With WordPress, different plugins can end up stumbling over each other, as each is coded for the core but doesn’t anticipate other plugins. You can also have naming conflicts — when functions or variables in different plugins are given the same name. This is often avoided by adding the plugin name to the beginning of each and every function, variable, constant, etc.

If you have multiple plugins, you probably have a good bit of code that you reuse in all of them. If you’ve been appending the plugin name all along, then any time you update those common functions, you can’t simply copy the new versions over to the other plugins — you have to go over them and update the function names and any internal calls from one function to another.

These problems and others can be avoided by using classes.

By wrapping your plugin’s functions in a PHP class, you gain a number of advantages. You can set plugin-wide variables. You can use common function names and create easily-remembered “wrapper” functions that modify the way common WP functions do things. You can create portable functions that can be copy-pasted into other plugins without any adjustment.

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