I'm going to be starting a fairly large PHP application this summer, on which I'll be the sole developer (so I don't have any coding conventions to conform to aside from my own).

PHP 5.3 is a decent language IMO, despite the stupid namespace token. But one thing that has always bothered me about it is the standard library and its lack of a naming convention.

So I'm curious, would it be seriously bad practice to wrap some of the most common standard library functions in my own functions/classes to make the names a little better? I suppose it could also add or modify some functionality in some cases, although at the moment I don't have any examples (I figure I will find ways to make them OO or make them work a little differently while I am working).

If you saw a PHP developer do this, would you think "Man, this is one shoddy developer?"

Additionally, I don't know much (or anything) about if/how PHP is optimized, and I know that usually PHP performace doesn't matter. But would doing something like this have a noticeable impact on the performance of my application?