You are to think about programmer’s productivity instead of being worried about program’s productivity first. And writing about objects as the author has done is the same as dividing scripts into the using associative massives and ones that don’t use them.

Most web-applications tasks are linear: request-> inner data transformation-> creating result page. Procedure approach solves such tasks well in simple cases.

Object oriented programming first of all helps when modeling complex systems with complicated behavior. By such approach final code may be written without using classes’ syntax but it remains object oriented nevertheless.

As for me, the main point is even not script’s work (finally, really complicated systems demanding big resources inputs aren’t created in PHP) but that if a product is going to be extended afterwards or not.

If I made a system which would never change and stay in its initial variant, I would choose procedure approach. In case I’m not sure that no serious changes either in the HTML-code or in the scripts are intended, I will choose object approach implying templates usage.

So from my point of view, the main task that should be set when choosing approach is the further destiny of a project.