Good news - overloading in PHP works after PHP 4.3.10.

Bad news - it's kind of not-totally-right. First off, it's not like operator overloading. Rather, it's a hook that dispatches some functions if the properties or methods don't exist in the class.

Best practicies for PHP overloading with some bug info. Basically, it says "don't overload a parent class, and overload only the final classes."

Comments at the php.net site.