Suggestions for naming classes

AllSpiritsEve

I am creating a cms based on the content system behind ezpublish. Its been a little confusing using their terminology though-- for example, having classes called Object, Class, ObjectAttribute, and ClassAttribute obviously conflict with PHP's OOP terms. Can anyone think of a better naming system for these classes?

mpb001

An object is an instantiated class so their naming convention seems a bit screwy.

The post fix part of the class name can be used to indicate what it does, the first part what type of thing it will do it on.

Eg. Postfixes

Convertor
Factory
Creator
Engine
Entry
Reader

Generic names such as Handler/Manager etc can be overused. I know I have done it.

At some point you may have so many classes it can get hard to remember what they do, so use something you'd think someone else would be able to guess the action from the name.

There is no hard and fast rule and possibly lots of arguments. What can be done is do a search for the name used in C#/Java for a similar thing and use that. They have thousands of names to pick from already that follow more common conventions. Can us the method names as well and maybe just do a port.

AllSpiritsEve

Well, the system is roughly analogous to an RDBMS: A class takes the place of a table, class attributes are columns of that table, an object is a certain row in that table, and for every class attribute, there's an object attribute. So their naming convention does kind of make sense, but is awkward when scripting.

Even using the database analogy, I wouldn't want a tableTableGateway, and a rowTableGateway, obviously those classes can be very misleading. I was thining maybe structure, or template, for the class, but I can't figure out a sensible renaming of object that would fit with those.

Thanks for the suggestions though, I'll have to look into Java a bit and see what kind of naming conventions they have.

NogDog

It might be worthwhile to poke around PEAR.php.net and see how the PEAR packages and classes are named and organized.