Here's a simple way to do name-based dispatch. $dispatchTable = array( 'First Thing' => 'functionName', 'Second Way' => array('ClassName', 'StaticMethod') ); ... ... $data = "Your data here, probably in an array."; call_user_func( $dispatchTable[ $name ], $data ); This is nice, because you can put the dispatch table at the top of your code, or in a separate file. I'm using it in a payment processing system, where different products may be dispatched to different code. You get a level of indirection here, where you can swap out different methods for each product (or use the same method). The only "trick" here is that, call_user_func() takes a pseudo-type known as a callback. Callbacks come in three forms:

string	'fooFunc'	this will call fooFunc()
array	array('Foo','func')	this will call Foo::func()
array	array( $foo, 'func')	this will call $foo->func()