A flood of new classes, Free trial for Advertisers, New PHP Conference in New York - PHP Classes blog

By Manuel Lemos
manuellemos.net
<email contact>

Hello,

This is a editor newsletter to talk about three topic:

- A flood of new classes contributed to the PHP Classes repository
- Free trial campaigns to let companies evaluate advertising in the site
- A new PHP conference to be held in New York, USA


- A flood of new classes contributed to the PHP Classes repository


Since the site started providing better means to upload class files and also let authors expose a bit more personal information about themselves, the number of contributed classes seem to have raised significantly.

As you know, when a new class is published a alert message is sent out to tens of thousands of site subscribers. To avoid overloading the e-mail server and also the subscribers with too many alert messages, the site is only approving one class per day.

However, due to the current surge of contributed classes, it is being considered to either raise the rate to two approved classes per day. Nothing has been decided yet but it is possible that the new class alert messages turn into a daily digest with the list of all classes approved in the same day.

That is a bit like duplicating the role of the site newsletter when set on the daily delivered mode. So, some other solution may be found to find a balance between not making authors wait too long for seeing their classes approved and not making subscribers get too many alert messages.

Until something is decide, the rate of approval will remain in one class per day. So, I just ask the authors to be a little more patient because it will be just a matter of a days until their classes are approved.

Anyway, since providing more personal information about the authors made their work more credible, I am giving priority to the pending classes of authors that provided more of the optional personal information, i.e.: the picture of their face, the birth date (to mention the age) and now two more interesting details that are the country of origin of the author and their home page. See the Contribute instructions page to learn more about how to provide these details properly:

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



- Free trial campaigns to let companies evaluate advertising in the site


As you may know the site has been try to sell its advertising space to any interested companies in order to generate additional income that will help to keep the site open.

Several potential advertisers have approached but very few bought ad space, despite the prices are very affordable with more efficient options to advertise in the site newsletters.

The idea that I got is that most advertisers are not sure if it would pay to advertise in this site. That is something that I cannot guarantee in advance because that depends a lot on the efficiency of the advertiser banners.

What I can guarantee is a reasonably high number of unique users that are exposed to the advertisements. Considering both the site and the newsletters, the advertisements are exposed often to over 10,000 unique users a day.

Anyway, I am committed to make the interested advertiser campaigns really work. The reason is that satisfied advertisers keep advertising over and over again and so everybody gains.

Since I cannot in advance guarantee that every campaign works well because of factors that do not depend on the best of my efforts, starting now and until 15th of March, the site will be offering no risk trial campaigns completely free of charge to companies interested to advertise products and services of interest to the PHP users.

This way, after the trial campaigns the advertising companies will be ready to decide whether advertising in this site will be really worth it. The trial campaigns are expected to last a week in average.

Since the site will not be able to run more than a half-dozen campaigns assuring great exposure to each banner, only the first free trial campaign requests will be attended. So, if you have a company that sells products or services of interest to the PHP users, I suggest that interested companies do not wait up too long to submit the free trial campaign requests.


- A new PHP conference to be held in New York, USA


Despite the odd times that we are living that have been affecting directly many sectors that deal with technology. PHP community seems to be growing upto a great level that it now justifies the organization of conference events dedicated to PHP.

This seems to be the case of the North American PHP community. After the great success of the San Francisco conference last year, this time is the turn of the East coast to have its own dedicated PHP conference.

The organization of the PHP-Con East 2003 has kind enough to forward me some relevant details of the event that I would like to share and encourage the North American PHP users to attend for the best of the local and worldwide PHP community:


PHPCon East 2003
April 23-25, 2003
Park Central New York Hotel
New York, New York
Register online at: http://www.php-con.com/return.php?i=cl2

PHPCon East is three days of intensive learning through hands-on
tutorials and three technical session tracks on Enterprise PHP,
Applications Development and XML/Web Services by PHP notables including
PHP inventor Rasmus Lerdorf, Zend's Zeev Suraski, MySQL's Zak Greant,
Apache.org's Jim Winstead and authors Luke Welling and Laura Thompson.

Register by March 31st and take advantage of reduced tutorial and
conference rates. Currently enrolled students, university faculty and
staff, and employees of non-profit associations get additional discounts
off registration rates. Log on to
http://www.php-con.com/return.php?i=cl2 for full program and
registration details.

PHPCon attendees are eligible for reduced room rates at the Park Central
New York and 10% discounts off fares with American Airlines and Amtrack.
Log onto PHPCon East's web site and click on the Hotel & Travel section
for reservation numbers and authorization codes.


Regards,
Manuel Lemos