According to this new post on his blog, Eli White has taken over the post of "community guy" at Zend (a post previously held by Cal Evans).
I've been offered a position at Zend, and accepted it. The official (lengthy) job title is Zend Community Manager/Leader & DevZone Editor-In-Chief. The short form to many people would be: "The job formerly held by Cal Evans" I'm extremely excited about this opportunity to work with Zend and to have the focus of my daily job to be working with the PHP community which I dearly love. I know that any attempt to fill Cal's shoes will be met with failure, so I hope instead to come up with my own twist on the position and to give it my best.
He'll be acting as the liason between the PHP company and the rest of the community including writing articles, doing some podcasting and all around getting in the middle of whatever's going on in the PHP community. Congrats Eli!
Ever wanted to know more about the individuals in the PHP community around you? You're in luck! The "Seven Things" meme has been zipping its way through the PHP community with some great results. I've tried to get together a list of the posts made so far - it's not going to get them all, but its a start. Those linked in the top list are ones tagged and with a blog post. The normal list at the bottom are those that are tagged but haven't gotten around to writing their Things:
If you're one of the ones that hasn't posted yet and you get around to it or if I've left someone's post out of the list, let me know and I'll update the list.
On the GitHub Support forums Kastner has proposed an idea - making something similar to gethub gems but for PHP:
Just like ruby/gems, PHP has a packaging/distribution system called PEAR. I think that running a pear channel would help the PHP community with things like GPL extensions, as well as increasing participation in the community. Thoughts?
There's already thirteen comments on the post, all supportive of the idea including interest from the GitHub folks themselves.
2008 was a great year for the PHP community - lots of growth, enhancements and improvements have lead us to where we are today. The language is stronger than ever and attracting more developers than it ever has. Let's take a look at just some of the things that made 2008 what it was:
Plenty of criticism and comparisons of PHP
The rise in popularity of the elePHPants
Growth in the PHP Women group (like the article contest and their 2nd brithday)
2008 - the Year of the Framework
PEAR Bug Traige event
Zend Framework's Dojo and AMF integration
A growing emphasis on unit testing and debugging
The last release in the PHP 4 series
Ibuildings launches their Center for Expertise (and Cal Evans is appointed Director)
Several major companies - like Microsoft and Adobe - show more interest in the PHP community
Lukas Smith launched his emPHPower iniative
php|architect launched their C7Y community website
this site made the move to the Solar Framework
PHPers participated once again in Google's Summer of Code
PEAR elctions were held
The Great Namespace Debate of 2008
Plenty of podcasts were released - PHP Abstract and the P3 Podcast
php|architect got a major overhaul of the site, the magazine and the structure of the company
Zend launched a new certification - Zend Framework Certified Engineer
Zend buyout rumors (no, it didn't happen)
the elePHPant World Tour
Continuing development on PHP 5.3
Conferences
CakeFest
PHP Brasil
PHP London
Dutch PHP Conference
Zend/PHP Conference & Expo
php|tek
php|works/PyWorks
PHP Quebec
PHP Appalachia
FrOSCon
International PHP Conference
PHP Camp
OpenExpo
PHP North West
SymfonyCamp
PHP Barcelona
PHP Security Camp
Our own job postings
Included companies like: CNet Networks, Ibuildings, Ning, InvestorGuide.com, Yahoo! and Schematic
In places like: Paris, UK, Nashville, Barcelona, New York, Zurich, Dallas and Chicago
After taking part in this year's PHP Brasil conference, Chris Jones has issued a challenge to the PHP group members and developers there - do everything you can to be a part of the global PHP community.
At PHP Brasil '08, one of the themes I saw was community involvement. [...] In post-conference conversation, Luke Crouch (SourceForge) and I touched on what is gained from attending conferences, and how quickly technology is picked up in Brazil. So, one thing I specifically did during the conference was to encourage the organizers and presenters to make the English speaking world more aware of their activities.
He points out a talk that's already been translated to English and some of the people he met that are part of global PHP-using companies.
On the Hurricane Software website they've done a comparison between PHP and Python judging them based on things like feature set, community and documentation.
What does it take to state one language better than other? One answer can be flexibility, development friendly, licensing policy (open source or commercial), community, portability, dynamic typing, support for variable number of function arguments and ability to freeze live objects in a string representation. Documentation of course is a major player when you choose a language because you still have to sharpen your skill and you haven't worked on that particular language yet.
They go through a list of the prominent features of each language as well as some basic benchmarks for mathematical operations like finding primes below 10000 and looping with a bit of calculation. They compare the two languages' speed of execution, speed of writing, ease of setup and portability.
You can also listen to the report via the in-page player.
With the final decision on the namespace operator announced, several of the PHP community have voiced opinions, comments and concerns about the selection including:
The PHPNW conference happens on November 22nd in Manchester (UK) and is a day-long even packed with great speakers and now a great panel discussion too. You can still register for your tickets on the conference website.
The PHPNW conference crew have just announced a newly added session to finish off the conference day - a panel discussion about the current state of the PHP community.
This will be a panel discussion on the topic "State of the Community" and will bring together some of the leading lights of the community to discuss the PHP community as a whole, how people can get involved, and how the community relates to PHP as a day job. If there's a question you'd like to see the panel answer, please post it in the comments below and we'll include as many as we can!
The conference happens on November 22nd in Manchester (UK) and there's still spots open if you'd like to attend.
On the LispCast blog there's this recent post comparing (surprise) Lisp and PHP and the latter's popularity in the online development communities.
My question is this: how did PHP get so many libraries, get installed on so many computers, and attract so much developer attention in the first place? [...] To summarize: Lisp is marketing itself poorly. Lisp either needs to get competitive on the ease of use and productivity front, or lose programmers to other languages.
He mentions this post from Brian Carper and this response as two places bringing up good points about Lisp and its community.
That's one of the things that PHP has going for it over Lisp - the community. PHP's community is constantly pushing, reaching out to the developers with simple tutorials and (usually) useful libraries. He makes a call to the Lisp developers out there, though:
The day will come when Lisp won't be cast aside as a quaint relic of bygone days. On that day, Lisp will be seen as equal to the big languages. And it will learn from and share with them as peers.
