Traits in PHP is a powerful way to reduce code duplication.

In inheritance, we can only inherit a single class. Here's an example.

class Object {
    public $width;
    public function setWidth($width) {
         $this -> width = $width;
    }
}

class Box extends Object {

}
$box = new Box;
$box -> setWidth(10);

Here, we used single inheritance. If we needed to use multiple inheritance, we cannot do that with extending. We will need to use Traits for that.

What are traits?

Traits are class-like which contains methods. Traits cannot be instantiated.

Here's a simple trait.

Trait ObjectToArray {
    public function getArray() {
         return get_object_vars($this);
    }
}

Let's use our trait in a class.

class User {
    use ObjectToArray;
    public function __construct($name, $country) {
        $this -> name = $name;
        $this -> country = $country;
    }
}

$user = new User('John', 'USA');
var_dump($user -> getArray());

In the same way you can use multiple traits in a class.

class User {
    use ObjectToArray;
    use ObjectToJSON;
    // and more...
}

Conclusion

Traits are quite useful if you need to use the same methods in multiple classes. Traits helps you to keep the code more organized. But, I haven't seen developers using Traits frequently. They tend to use inheritance and interfaces.

I'm not sure about the reason, but, what I assume is that most of PHP devs are not aware of Traits.

Thank you for reading!