Overloading in PHP describes the way in which properties and methods of an object can be dynamically created or accessed without having to define them first. Traditionally, the word overloading in programming is used to describe accessing object methods with the same name but with different parameters. It is not possible to do this in PHP as it will complain about methods having the same name, so the term describes calling a method or accessing a property that hasn't previously been set or is out of scope. In object orientated terms this means that the method or property is private.

One thing that PHP doesn't allow is the creation of multiple functions with the same name. If you try this then PHP will give you a fatal error. Creating different functions with the same name is useful if you want to pass different parameters to a function that produces the same result. There are two ways around this problem.

The first is that you can pass the function an array of the items that you want. You can then use this array in the function to do whatever you want. For example.