Question

I am using includes to pull in the various functions I am using, and I am now starting to use include to pull in chunks of HTML/PHP. Is there a point where I have overused includes?

Answer 1

As soon as you start having problems reading your own code that you wrote some time ago, it’s definitely too much.

I recommend programming in object oriented PHP and using autoloaders to avoid include/require as far as possible. Excessive use of include/require often leads to unreadable and unmaintainable spaghetti code, which is very bad.

In small projects I usually just have one require statement to pull in my autoloader function(s) and in larger applications I use Zend Framework where I rely on Zend_Loader exclusively.

From a purist point of view I’d say: More than 3 includes/requires in your own code (without third party libs) is too much:

1. One for inluding some iniitialization stuff
2. One for loading the autoloader class/function
3. And the one in the autoloader itself. There should only be one function that actually incudes/requires files. That function or method can then be reused in extended autoloader classes.

I mostly try to stick to that principle.