PHP Classes Site 24th Anniversary and Future Plans

In this article you will read about:

2. What Are the Plans for the Evolution of the Site

2.1. Increase PHP Developers Sources of Revenue

1. Short Note about PHP Classes 24th Anniversary

The PHP Classes site was started in June 24 of 1999 as means to help PHP developers to get more exposure to their own PHP components.

Over here at Icontem, the parent company of the PHP Classes site, we celebrate the life of the site every day. On this aniversary we did a short celebration because are very busy with new developments.

Here is just one picture and a short video of this anniversary:

2. What Are the Plans for the Evolution of the Site

2.1. Increase PHP Developers Sources of Revenue

One of the difficulties that many developers have is to have financial stability that allows them to have a life of great quality.

What happens is that developers that work employed in one company or work as consultants often only have one source of revenue, which is the company that pays them their salaries or consulting fees.

That is fine while those developers have a job or have consulting customers that pay their fees.

The problem is that if they loose their jobs due to layoffs or their consulting contracts end, they loose their only source of revenue.

Despite I do not like when this happens any of you, the reality is that it happens and cause a lot of anxiety and depression to anybody that goes through a period without any source of revenue.

The solution for this problem is to have more sources of revenue. In practice this means more customers paying every month.

As an employee or consultant, you usually do not have much free time to have more customers at the same time.

What you need to do is to evolve your work practices to become a business owner and sell your own products and services.

This is what I have been doing since 2001 when my son was born. I feel that I am privileged because this is not the reality of many other developers.

Therefore I am going to start giving mentoring to help any developer that is interested to evolve and become a business owner.

The mentoring sessions will be provided individually and are personalized. Everybody have specific needs and desires. They have current problems that are different from other developer problems.

Mentoring sessions that are collective do not work well because each person is in a different moment of their business life.

Mentoring that works like courses on which the mentor teaches what they know instead of what the mentoring student wants to know also do not work well because often those classes are not relevant for the students.

So I will depart from your current problems to provide solutions based on business design patterns that many successful companies have been using for many years, including mine.

Here are some examples of things that you may learn. From these possibilities you will tell me what you want to learn.

• Split your time between your current work and your work to become a business owner

• Pick compatible partners that will help you to split your work and have a peaceful relationship with you

• Find the best opportunities to create or evolve your own products or services that have great demand and there are customers willing to pay.

• Organize your business finances to assure your company is profitable

• Find the best price for your products and services that your customers will agree to pay

• Advertise your products and services to attract customer paying the lowest advertising fees

• Sell products and services paying the smallest fees to payment gateways

• Other aspects about successful businesses that you may want to learn

The expect date for rhese mentoring sessions to start being offered is August 2023.

2.2. Improving the Site User Experience

Sometime ago we did a research work to ask several users what would be the improvements that the users would like us to implement in the site. Several users mentioned the user experience.

We are already working on those improvments. Since those are many improvements, it will take us a good amount of time to implement all of them.

So you may expect gradual changes in the user experience, especially for users that access the site using their mobile phones.

2.3. Helping Developers to Get More Feedback to Improve Their PHP Components

One of the reasons for many developers to share their work with other developers is to get feedback either in the form of bug reports or feature suggestions or even code improvements.

While this is true, many developers get frustrated because they do not get much feedback.

We have a plan to change this. We expect to work on this in 2024.

2.4. Helping Developers to Teach How to Use their Packages in a Way that is Easier to Understand by The Users

One of the greatest frustrations of many users that want to use existing packages is the lack of documentation or even the format of documentation that exists is not easy to follow by the users.

We also have a plan to help developers to improve the way they teach other developers on how to use their packages. We also expect to work on this in 2024.