Code reuse is one of the most important aspects of object-oriented programming. In PHP, you use inheritance to enable code reuse in different classes that share the same inheritance hierarchy. To achieve code reuse, you move the common functionality of classes to method of the parent class. Inheritance makes the code very tightly coupled therefore makes the code hard to maintain.
To overcome this problem, as of version 5.4.0, PHP introduced a new unit of code reuse named trait. Traits allow you to reuse a set of methods freely in many different classes that does not need to be in the same class hierarchy.
A Trait is intended to reduce some limitations of single inheritance by enabling a developer to reuse sets of methods freely in several independent classes living in different class hierarchies.
Trait is similar to class but it is only for grouping methods in a fine-grained and consistent way. It is not allowed to instantiate a trait on its own.
- Create Trait
- Use Trait
More info is here: http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.traits.php
