It’s no secret that many WordPress plugins are poorly designed. Some have been started as simple tools and grew larger until they became unmanageable, others were created by inexperienced developers who did their best. The sad truth is that WordPress provides complete freedom in designing plugins while many developers aren’t ready to take the responsibility. I’ll explain how I design plugins, and the cornerstone of this architecture is utilizing namespaces.
So why do we need namespaces in the first place? The most straightforward answer is shortening names of our classes and functions. Anybody who used to work with Zend Framework v1 (or almost every PHP framework created prior to PHP 5.3) has seen names like this: Zend_View_Helper_Placeholder_Container_Abstract. Imagine every single class name being this long and you get the idea. WordPress plugins often have the same problem – every class, every function you create has to have a unique name among all plugins ever created, so they often end up being too long to be convenient.