2002 developments in the PHP Classes site - PHP Classes blog

By Manuel Lemos
manuellemos.net
<email contact>

First I would like to mention some of the latest developments that either I was not able to announce or they are not yet visible.

In the continued effort to bring more new users and consequently more potentially contributing authors, the "Friends of the PHP Classes site" initiative was extended to partners sites.

Some of the partner sites were already sending new users for a long time, but none was getting more recognition and consequent exposure for sending more users than others. Now, those that adhered to the partner friend of the PHP Classes site and keep sending many new subscribers are getting more exposure in this page, that is certainly well deserved:

http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/top/top.html#partners

If you want to participate in the friends of the PHP Classes initiative and earn some recognition either as an individual user, partner site or mirror site host, you may learn all about it here:

http://www.phpclasses.org/friends.html

One of the latest enhancements, is that if you want to display an updated listing of the latest classes or book reviews in a site of yours, you are now able to customize colors and other presentation details of the listings so it can look more integrated in your site design.


Another enhancement that you may have noticed already is that right next to the top partners of the site ranking in the page mentioned above, there is now the a top of the ranking of all PHP sites dedicated exclusively to PHP like this one, according to Alexa.com traffic metrics.

Thanks to most of you, the PHP Classes site is now one of the Top 5 sites dedicated to PHP and keeps raising in the charts. Congratulations to all that made this possible.

Regarding other developments, you may not have heard much from me lately regarding the planned services to paying subscribers that will keep this site viable so I can continue to dedicate to it exclusively at full time. However, the developments continue and I hope to start showing some of the new services early in 2003.

Meanwhile, to generate some income, I have just joined the site to a market place where the advertisment space is sold to interested advertisers. For now it does not bring much money but it still something.

If you are interested to advertised in the site at better prices that you may get in the marketplace, feel free to mail me privately about this. Please don't mail me if you are not really interested to advertise. I already get plenty of enquiries from people that are just curious about the prices and just make me spend a lot of time writing messages with no return.

Anyway, one important consequence of this initiative is that the alert messages sent by the site when there is new content will also have ads on them, like the site content newsletter already has. This means that messages will be sent in HTML for those that have that option set in their user options page. If you are not interested in getting messages with ads, just change your preferred message format option.

Back to the services for paying subscribers, the main reason that is delaying them is that I have been developing base tools that will help me to speed up the development of such services.

One of the tools that I developed in the last 3 months and have already released as Open Source is named Metastorage. It is basically a CASE tool that lets me declare classes of objects and their eventual relationships using a simple XML format.

From then on Metastorage generates all the code that is necessary to map such classes of objects to tables in a relational database. With Metastorage I save many days or weeks of development that I would usually take to write, test and debug the generated classes manually.

As a bonus, Metastorage also generates Entity-Relationship graphs that represent the diagrams of classes in UML. These graphs can be rendered in many common image formats that can be used to include in documentation that helps the projects be well understood by others.

Metastorage was not meant just to develop the PHP Classes services. It is generic for database application development, especially for large enterprise applications and at the same time lets you have great control over the generated code, unlike many other CASE tools. The good part is that it generates PHP code. :-)

You may obtain more information about Metastorage in these pages. If you are interested to learn more about it or somehow contribute to its development. Feel free to contact me privately.

http://www.meta-language.net/news-2002-12-09-metastorage.htm ...

http://www.meta-language.net/metastorage.html

Soon I hope to get back to you regarding the site services. I already have a mailing list ready to discuss these services that I will announce later.

If we do not speak to each other soon, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year of 2003.