Can I extend a class using more than 1 class in PHP?

If you really want to fake multiple inheritance in PHP 5.3, you can use the magic function __call().

This is ugly though it works from class A user's point of view :

class B {
    public function method_from_b($s) {
        echo $s;
    }
}

class C {
    public function method_from_c($s) {
        echo $s;
    }
}

class A extends B
{
  private $c;
    
  public function __construct()
  {
    $this->c = new C;
  }
    
  // fake "extends C" using magic function
  public function __call($method, $args)
  {
    $this->c->$method($args[0]);
  }
}


$a = new A;
$a->method_from_b("abc");
$a->method_from_c("def");

Prints "abcdef"

You cannot have a class that extends two base classes. You could not have the following:

// this is NOT allowed (for all you google speeders)
Matron extends Nurse, HumanEntity

You could however have a hierarchy as follows...

Matron extends Nurse    
Consultant extends Doctor

Nurse extends HumanEntity
Doctor extends HumanEntity

HumanEntity extends DatabaseTable
DatabaseTable extends AbstractTable

and so on.

Classes are not meant to be just collections of methods. A class is supposed to represent an abstract concept, with both state (fields) and behaviour (methods) which changes the state. Using inheritance just to get some desired behaviour sounds like bad OO design, and exactly the reason why many languages disallow multiple inheritance: in order to prevent "spaghetti inheritance", i.e. extending 3 classes because each has a method you need, and ending up with a class that inherits 100 method and 20 fields, yet only ever uses 5 of them.

There are plans for adding mix-ins soon, I believe.

But until then, go with the accepted answer. You can abstract that out a bit to make an "extendable" class:

class Extendable{
  private $extender=array();

  public function addExtender(Extender $obj){
    $this->extenders[] = $obj;
    $obj->setExtendee($this);
  }

  public function __call($name, $params){
    foreach($this->extenders as $extender){
       //do reflection to see if extender has this method with this argument count
       if (method_exists($extender, $name)){
          return call_user_func_array(array($extender, $name), $params);
       }
    }
  }
}


$foo = new Extendable();
$foo->addExtender(new OtherClass());
$foo->other_class_method();

Note that in this model "OtherClass" gets to 'know' about $foo. OtherClass needs to have a public function called "setExtendee" to set up this relationship. Then, if it's methods are invoked from $foo, it can access $foo internally. It will not, however, get access to any private/protected methods/variables like a real extended class would.

I have read several articles discouraging inheritance in projects (as opposed to libraries/frameworks), and encouraging to program agaisnt interfaces, no against implementations.
They also advocate OO by composition: if you need the functions in class a and b, make c having members/fields of this type:

class C
{
    private $a, $b;

    public function __construct($x, $y)
    {
        $this->a = new A(42, $x);
        $this->b = new B($y);
    }

    protected function DoSomething()
    {
        $this->a->Act();
        $this->b->Do();
    }
}

PHP does not yet support multiple class inheritance, it does however support multiple interface inheritance.

See http://www.hudzilla.org/php/6_17_0.php for some examples.

PHP does not allow multiple inheritance, but you can do with implementing multiple interfaces. If the implementation is "heavy", provide skeletal implementation for each interface in a seperate class. Then, you can delegate all interface class to these skeletal implementations via object containment.

class A extends B {}

class B extends C {}

Then A has extended both B and C