Php – Best way to present a Development and Live version

We have all of our code deployed in MSIs using Setup Factory. If something has to change we redeploy the entire solution. This sounds like overkill for a css file, but it absolutely keeps all environments in sync, and we know exactly what is in production (we deploy to all test and uat environments the same way).

I'd probably do something like this:

<?php

class Student
{
    public function __construct() {
        // allocate your stuff
    }

    public static function withID( $id ) {
        $instance = new self();
        $instance->loadByID( $id );
        return $instance;
    }

    public static function withRow( array $row ) {
        $instance = new self();
        $instance->fill( $row );
        return $instance;
    }

    protected function loadByID( $id ) {
        // do query
        $row = my_awesome_db_access_stuff( $id );
        $this->fill( $row );
    }

    protected function fill( array $row ) {
        // fill all properties from array
    }
}

?>

Then if i want a Student where i know the ID:

$student = Student::withID( $id );

Or if i have an array of the db row:

$student = Student::withRow( $row );

Technically you're not building multiple constructors, just static helper methods, but you get to avoid a lot of spaghetti code in the constructor this way.