Inheritance is a well established programming principle, and PHP makes use of this principle in its object model. This principle will affect the way many classes and objects relate to one another.
For example when you extend a class, the subclass inherits all of the public and protected methods from the parent class. Unless a class overrides those methods, they will retain their original functionality.
This is useful for defining and abstracting functionality, and permits the implementation of additional functionality in similar objects without the need to re-implement all of the shared functionality.
Often you need classes with similar variables and functions to another existing class. In fact, it is good practice to define a generic class which can be used in all your projects and adapt this class for the needs of each of your specific projects. To facilitate this, classes can be extensions of other classes. The extended or derived class has all variables and functions of the base class (this is called ‘inheritance’ despite the fact that nobody died) and what you add in the extended definition. It is not possible to subtract from a class, that is, to undefine any existing functions or variables. An extended class is always dependent on a single base class, that is, multiple inheritance is not supported. Classes are extended using the keyword ‘extends‘.
