What are some best practices for generating unique article numbers in a PHP script?

When generating unique article numbers in a PHP script, it is important to ensure that each number is unique to avoid duplicates. One common approach is to use a combination of a timestamp and a random number to create a unique identifier. This can be achieved by concatenating the current timestamp with a randomly generated number using functions like `time()` and `rand()` in PHP.

// Generate a unique article number using timestamp and random number
$unique_article_number = time() . rand(1000, 9999);
echo $unique_article_number;