Always code as... | PHP Zone
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
Always code as if you were paying your lines' weight in gold. The less code you write to solve a problem, the less code you'll have to maintain: code is widely considered a liability more than an asset. You should favor verbosity only to improve readability and encapsulation: the trade-off is difficult to find here.
Always code as if you had to deploy and use your application at the end of the day. Which may be the case if it's a web application. Portability is not a feature you can add as single user story: the best way to make an application portable, configurable, deployable and most of all working is to build it as simple as possible with these characteristics (a walking skeleton), and keep them while you expand the codebase with new features.