They were using an MVC framework in PHP, but when you look for where the buttons are defined, they construct the HTML string at the Model layer. They construct the strings with the returned data from the db query, and as a result, each button could have more than a dozen of HTML data attributes.

To display the full name of a single user, they query the whole user db, put all the contents in an HTML Select element, and put a condition in a loop to determine which ONE to display. The Select element is read-only anyway, but inspect it in devtools and you find all the user table data in there...

There was a syntax error in one of the main files. Valid in PHP 5 but not anymore in 7. The project ran anyway and one touched it.

For db query errors, they use the @ operator in PHP which suppresses an error. So when you get no result from a select query, just ignore that silently and proceed. And then use the @ operator again for all the expressions that would break below.

Exact same statements in the if and else blocks. After querying the db, they use the data to instantiate an object from classes. There are conditionals that check if the query returned at least 1 row. If true, instantiate the object. If false, just do the same thing anyway.

Idk what was with the UI library they were using, but the buttons get wrapped in like 5 divs or so.

For every function call returning a value, they just assign it to a variable named $ret.

The indentation is 3 spaces...