expanding an application w/o creating a mess

[jay0316]

Hi, I've been using php for a little over 2 years.  I'd consider myself between beginner and intermediate user.  I have a custom application that I developed for the company I work for.  Over time I continue to get requests for new features or to make exceptions for certain senarios.

 

I'm finding that it starts to complicate the code quite a bit, and I'm afraid that eventually it's going to get harder and harder to read and understand.  In general, are there any topics or books or guidelines that I could research for keeping the code easy to manage as you continue to expand an application?

[ignace]

I'm finding that it starts to complicate the code quite a bit, and I'm afraid that eventually it's going to get harder and harder to read and understand.  In general, are there any topics or books or guidelines that I could research for keeping the code easy to manage as you continue to expand an application?

 

OO has a reputation (if used in a correct fashion) for letting your code-base grow without that many headaches. But this may be not an option at the time as the application is already build and re-building is expensive. So I would advice to try to re-factor your current code-base.