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Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:33 UTC
I thought I’d take a quick moment to promote myself by making a meta-post about Chris Shiflett’s latest PHP Advent Calendar entry from me.
I’m often asked how one can get involved in the PHP community, so I decided to write my entry about just that, offering suggestions for how one can get help from the community, get connected to the community, and get involved in the community by giving back.
Credit for the idea goes to Brian DeShong, who recommended I write it. Thanks, Brian! 
I hope you’ll find a way to get connected and involved in, in what is my opinion, the greatest community of any programming language.
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas!
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Tags: advent, community, php
Tue, 11 Dec 2007 17:29 UTC
» Download the Widget Now!
NEW RELEASE! I’ve released version 1.1 of the funcaday.com dashboard widget. This release provides for better interoperability with Paul’s service and uses his new JSON interface instead of the RSS feed.
Last night, I was vigorously attacked by a virus of some sort. My body ached, I tossed and turned all night, and I got no sleep. It was not fun. This morning, taking a sick day and feeling much better with the help of meds, I decided to do something I haven’t had the luxury of doing for a while: catch up on blog posts.
While reading through news and blog entries, I came across a post on Zend’s Developer Zone about Paul Reinheimer’s new PHP Function a Day website. The Function a Day site functions in much the same way as those nifty tear-off-a-page-per-day desktop calendars we all buy for those on our Christmas shopping lists for whom we can’t quite figure out what to get. The calendars are hit-or-miss. The Far Side is always a popular favorite; Inspirational Stories of Left-Handed Leaders not so much.
Paul’s Function a Day, however, is a hit with but one problem: I have to visit the site everyday to see the newest calendar entry. Ick! If I know me—and I hope I know me—then I know I’ll forget to visit the site. Thus, in my sicken and medicated stupor, I decided to do the only logical thing one would do while taking a sick day: write some code!
Thus was born the PHP Function a Day Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X. Now, you can have the Function a Day delivered right to your desktop just like that day-to-day calendar, except this time, you don’t have to remember to tear off the page each day. Enjoy!
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Tags: community, dashboard, php, widget
Wed, 7 Mar 2007 21:33 UTC
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Ben Ramsey
770-704-5279
Email: ben [at] phpgroups.org
Web site: www.phpgroups.org
Worldwide support network for PHP user groups launches
ATLANTA, Ga., Mar. 7, 2007 – PHP Groups, a worldwide network for PHP user groups, launched today with the intent to foster an open community for PHP user groups to share and exchange ideas and information. Membership is open to anyone working with a PHP user group or interested in starting one.
“This is a great opportunity for PHP user groups to become more aware of each other, find out what works and what doesn’t, and share ideas and, potentially, some resources. I think the overall PHP community will benefit from this kind of exchange at the grassroots level—the user groups,” said Ben Ramsey, the organizer of the Atlanta PHP user group and one of the founding members of PHP Groups.
Every month, PHP.net lists events for over fifty PHP user groups. However, there may be as many as 200 or more PHP user groups around the world. PHP Groups seeks to unite these user groups and provide a means for them to communicate with each other.
User groups are clubs focused on the use of a particular technology. PHP user groups focus on the PHP programming language and related technologies such as Linux, the Apache Web server, and the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. The first PHP user group formed in Chicago in 1997.
At present, PHP Groups provides a mailing list where user group leaders and those interested may subscribe and take part in a dialog with other user groups. “I hope that part of our accomplishments will involve uniting and bringing together for an open dialog all of the PHP user groups across the world,” said Ramsey. “I hope this mailing list can get that conversation going.”
To subscribe to the PHP Groups mailing list, go to www.phpgroups.org.
About PHP Groups
PHP Groups networks PHP user groups into a tighter community, provides a means to share information and resources among its community members, and aids in the formation of new PHP user groups.
About PHP
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, or simply PHP, is a “widely-used general-purpose scripting language,” designed with the Internet in mind. Commonly implemented to manipulate databases and dynamic content on the server, PHP is also an indispensable local scripting tool. Delivering high performance, intuitive syntax, powerful structure, and a rich feature set, PHP puts ideas into action, both locally and on the Internet.
###
Download a PDF version of this press release.
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Tags: community, php, php-group, php-mongers, phpgroups, user-group
Mon, 8 Jan 2007 18:43 UTC
PHP Throwdown announced today that registration is now open for any individual or team interested in taking part in the competition. PHP Throwdown is, in a nutshell, a competition to see what can be accomplished with PHP in a span of 24 hours.
I’m one of the judges, and I look forward to seeing what you (and your team) will create on Saturday, January 27th!
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Tags: community, competitions, php, phpthrowdown
Sat, 23 Dec 2006 3:43 UTC
It’s become a personal tradition of mine to try various winter and holiday ales and lagers each year around this time. I’ve also found that many members of the PHP community are aficionados of good beer. Thus, my Christmas gift to the PHP community this year will be a list of recommended winter brews. I won’t spend too much time describing the beers. Instead, I’ll link to their pages at Beer Advocate (a PHP-driven site) for reviews.
- Sweetwater Festive Ale 2006, Sweetwater Brewing Company
You can tell I’m a big fan of the Samuel Adams beers. My favorites in this list are the Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale and the Samuel Adams Winter Lager (always a winter favorite of mine). I was somewhat disappointed with the 2006 recipe for the Sweetwater Festive Ale; it was a bit too sweet for my liking, but I list it here because it’s an Atlanta beer.
Feel free to leave a comment with your winter brew recommendations.
Cheers and Merry Christmas!
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Tags: ale, beer, christmas, community, holiday, lager, php, winter
Thu, 4 May 2006 14:53 UTC
The other day, I came across Scott Johnson’s PHP OPML Reading List. Offering an OPML reading list for others to download is a great idea, and, since I’ve not yet blogged about it, I wanted to point out that I’ve been doing this for a long while now. On my home page, under the “syndicate” heading, is a link to my OPML blogroll. Feel free to import my OPML into your feed reader; that’s what it’s there for. (Please also note that I use SimpleXML to generate the blogroll on my home page from this list.)
There’s a lot of overlap between Scott’s and my list; however, I think both lists provide a good overview of some of the great PHP bloggers out there—and I know there are many more than are on these lists, as pointed out by Chris.
In other news, the PHP development team released PHP 5.1.3 earlier this week, and, shortly thereafter, a user reported a critical bug with data in the $_POST array when submitting from a multi-part form. As of right now, there is no official release update posted on the PHP downloads page, but Chris provides a link to download the 5.1.4 source from a mirror.
I’ve already compiled and updated from the new source, and I encourage you to do the same.
UPDATE (5/5/06 4:30 UTC): The PHP team has made an official announcement concerning the 5.1.4 release on their Web site and have updated the downloads page.
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Tags: blogging, community, feed-reader, opml, php, xml
Sun, 30 Apr 2006 19:28 UTC
Jim Plush’s recent blog post “The Soon to be PHP Boom” reminded me of my October 2005 post “What’s Good for Zend is Good for PHP.” In that post, I observed—from comments made by Marc Andreessen in the Wall Street Journal and Zend’s involvement in the Enterprise—that “the forecast for PHP looks bright and sunny.”
Indeed, if Jim’s post is any indication, that future is getting brighter and sunnier.
Jim lists some ways for up-and-coming PHP programmers to hone their skills and get noticed. I’d like to add one additional thing to it: blog, blog, blog! Start a blog and begin taking part in the PHP blogosphere by offering your opinions and experience to the PHP community. In addition (and, perhaps, more importantly), read the blogs of other PHP developers. A good place to start is to take a look at the blogroll on my home page.
It may take a while (and, generally, in the PHP community, it doesn’t take very long), but you will soon be noticed, and potential employers will be able to find you easily through search engines (as Jim suggested). From my experience, starting a blog about PHP is a quick and easy way to make connections and network with others. You simply need to start and make it a regular habit to blog—unlike the near silence I’ve had over the past six months.
I think the number of PHP jobs will only grow over the next few years, as middle-to-upper management folks begin to realize the value of PHP—or, if anything, they begin to realize that PHP is a buzzword they need to add to their repertoire of tools.
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Tags: blogging, community, jobs, php, zend
Fri, 21 Oct 2005 19:57 UTC
I began this year with the optimistic outlook that it would be the “year of PHP.” Indeed, little did I know that this hopeful view would come true. With astounding and visionary statements from such prominent figures as Marc Andreessen, who recently joined the board of Zend Technologies, Inc.—“when it comes to the Web and Web applications, Java is not the right language1” and “PHP is to 2005 what Java was to 19951”—the forecast for PHP looks bright and sunny.
Yet, for whatever reason, not everyone in the PHP community is excited about this show of support, and with Zend’s announcement of the PHP Collaboration Project this week at the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, this sentiment has been voiced on more than one blog. While, I did not have the privilage of attending the conference, news has spread fast, and I’d like to share why I feel that what’s good for Zend is good for PHP overall.
But before I go into much more detail, let me explain my relationship—or lack thereof—to Zend: I have no vested interest or stake in Zend. I am not an investor. I am not employed by them. In fact, I am not close friends with anyone who works at Zend. So, nothing I say here is influenced by a relationship I have with Zend. Yet, nevertheless, I have an interest in the survival of Zend Technologies, Inc. because I have an investment in the PHP language.
What? How does Zend’s survival have anything to do with the language itself? Let me tell you how. The success of PHP in the marketplace directly correlates to the success of Zend. If Zend fails, then PHP fails.
This does not mean that PHP will cease to exist if Zend fails, but it means that there will no longer be an advocate for PHP to the Enterprise. Why do you think Java has been so successful in the Enterprise? Is it because of its superiority as a programming language? Not in the least. It’s because Sun has been there from day one advocating its adoption. Zend is here now to do the same for PHP. And where Zend is successful in convincing the Enterprise of PHP’s scalability and power there will be jobs for PHP developers.
So, now we come to the question of the PHP Collaboration Project, which many are describing as the “Zend PHP Framework.” Since June, I have known that this framework was something that the folks at Zend were cooking up, but, at the time, they were still unclear on how they wanted to approach it. There seemed to be two sides to the coin, as I understood it: 1) the framework would be developed by Zend and used in Enterprise projects, or 2) the framework would be developed, at first, by Zend for Enterprise-grade applications and then released to the community as an open-source project. In either scenario, Zend would be the major driving force in the development of the framework.
Yet, agree with me or not, Zend is committed to the PHP community and the PHP Group, while, at the same time, their corporate goal is to encourage and drive PHP adoption in the Enterprise. To fuse these two ideals, it appears they have created the PHP Collaboration Project not to create a “Zend PHP Framework,” but to foster the development of a community-driven, Enterprise-grade framework. Herein lies the core of what Zend is about: Zend wants to remain true to the community, and by connecting the community to the Enterprise with this collaborative project, they solidify the relationship between the community and the Enterprise and ensure a future job market for PHP developers.
I laud Zend’s commitment to the community, and I commend them on their successes in advocating PHP to the Enterprise. Both the community and Enterprise adoption are important to me, and they should be important to you. Far too often do I see a staunch commitment to the PHP community with an increasingly negative attitude towards the Enterprise. This arises from people’s varying philosophical beliefs and values, but it is detrimental to the job market. I, for one, cannot live without a job, and if the Enterprise takes hold of PHP and starts using it with the same fervor they embraced Java, then I can rest assured knowing that PHP will be around for many years, and I will be able to easily find PHP jobs.
Still, what does this mean for the core of the language? How much influence will these large companies have on the community, and how much push-and-pull will they be able to inject into the language development process? I think this is a worry that is on many people’s minds, and I think it’s a legitimate concern. What pandora’s box has Zend opened by involving the Enterprise with the community? I think these concerns can be assuaged with one word (or acronym, rather): PECL.
More and more, core developers have been working to remove “bloat” from the PHP core and relegate it to PECL, where it can live a satisfying life, free from the controversies of the internals mailing list. Anyone can create a PHP extension and be a part of the PECL community without having to go through the extensive—and often controversial—process of having code accepted into the core. Thus, companies—or developers of the PHP Collaboration Project’s framework—requiring add-ons to the PHP core can easily develop an extension and distribute it via PECL. IBM is already doing this with their SDO contribution, and the Midgard framework uses a custom PHP extension to improve performance. Why is PECL not a not logical and obvious choice for the Enterprise to use? Why must we first assume that companies will request changes to the PHP core and pressure the PHP Group through Zend to make these changes?
Finally, frameworks abound in the PHP community, but after ten years of growth and development, not one framework has stepped out above the rest as a leader. With all the hype surrounding Ruby on Rails, it is obvious that the PHP community is lacking a good, solid framework. It is also clear that the Enterprise is looking for exactly this. If providing an Enterprise-grade framework will spur the adoption of PHP in the marketplace, thus providing more jobs to PHP developers, then I think Zend has stepped foward to show both their commitment to the Enterprise and the community. This is a show of faith to the community; Zend could have easily developed the framework on their own, but, instead, they have invited everyone to share input: community and Enterprise alike.
To Zend, I say, thank you for this opportunity. To the Enterprise, I say, here’s looking forward to a bright future. And to the community, I say, good luck in making this partnership work—it’s all up to you.
1 qtd. in Bank, David. “PHP Language Wins Supporters As Tool for Making Web Software.” The Wall Street Journal Online 29 Sept. 2005. .
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Tags: community, enterprise, framework, php, zend
