PHP Classes Completed 17 Years: A New Type of Classes

Contents

17 Years is a Long Time for a Site

Search for Packages Recommended by Other users

Better Package Publishing System

Large packages can be imported from repositories

More Visibility to Notable Packages

The elePHPant Plush Toy is now one of the Prizes for Innovation Award Winners

Innovation Award Nominees and Winner Certificates

Zephir and PHP 7 Packages are Now supported

A New Type of Classes for Developers that Want to Evolve and Become Business Owners

17 Years is a Long Time for a Site

PHP Classes completed 17 years of age on June 24. It is a long time for a site that is mostly maintained by one person with the help of many contributors that want to benefit from the exposure that the site provides to their work.

Still the new developments of the site continued to be intensive in the last year. Let me give you a brief overview of the latest improvements of the site.

Search for Packages Recommended by Other users

In February it was launched a new feature that allows developers that search on the site, so they can already see package recommendations about the keywords that they entered in the search box.

Better Package Publishing System

In April lots of features were launched to improve the process of publishing new packages:

Many things that were confusing were simplified. Developers are encouraged further to import packages from Git repositories instead of uploading files manually.

The package pages now can show a link to the package repository site, so they can encourage other developers to collaborate in the package development. 

Large packages can be imported from repositories

As consequence of the improved package import system, many developers started publishing very large packages with hundreds or thousands of files in each package. That cause the import system to make an excessive use of memory.

A new feature was implemented to store file data in temporary files during the import process, so it no longer exceeds the PHP memory limits.

More Visibility to Notable Packages

Now notable packages are notified to all regular users that are active in the site. Previously only premium subscribers with see notable package notifications. Also notable package articles are also posted in the site blog. This provides a greater exposure to notable packages.

The elePHPant Plush Toy is now one of the Prizes for Innovation Award Winners

Now innovation award winners can also pick one elePHPant plush toy as one of the available prizes along with others from other sponsors. These elePHPants are personalized with a stripe that shows the winner name and the month of the award.

Here follows some pictures of the first winners that picked the elePHPant prize: Gabriel Couto Rodrigues from Brazil and Tran Tuan from Thailand.

Innovation Award Nominees and Winner Certificates

Now all past, present and future nominees and winners of the PHP Innovation Award will get certificates that they can download in PDF format and print them if they want.

Zephir and PHP 7 Packages are Now supported

Zephir is a language derived from PHP that is aimed to write PHP extensions that can work with regular PHP code.

Now PHP Classes supports also packages written in Zephir. There is a new group of packages written in Zephir, as well a new group for packages specific for PHP 7.

A New Type of Classes for Developers that Want to Evolve and Become Business Owners

Well the big news this year is a new initiative that is not really inside PHP Classes.

PHP Classes was created with the goal to give more exposure to the work of developers that want to share their PHP components. You know, if you publish your packages just in GitHub or any other site, you still need to do some kind of marketing effort to have your packages more visible to other developers. PHP Classes goal is to make that marketing effort automatic.

New packages are notified automatically users that want to learn about any new packages. Updated packages are notified to users that previously downloaded those packages.

Innovation award and notable packages are announced to other site users. Good packages for specific purposes are recommended by other users in the site search pages. And so on.

The new initiative has a different goal but always having in mind to make developers happier in their software development careers.

The idea is to teach other developers what to do and what you should not do to develop successful software products that you can sell to many customers, so you no longer have to work for others to make a living.

Initially there will be a set a videos that teach the basic things about successful software product business practices.

Soon there will also be a free online workshop that provide all the essential business knowledge that will help you have good software product ideas, market and sell your products to as many customers as possible.

Later there will be opportunities to have personalized assistance to create your own software product business.

For now you can watch the first videos below. If you want to be notified about the new videos and the upcoming free workshop, click on the links to signup below the video pages with either your Facebook account (recommended) or entering your email address.

I am very excited with this new initiative because it will provide an opportunity for developers to learn about software product business with greater chance of success. There is a lot of work to do but this initiative is in progress.

For now your feedback is well appreciated. Just comment in the pages of the videos. Below the videos there is a comments box on which you can give your opinion or ask questions.

There are also share buttons on those pages. You can help spreading about this initiative by sharing the video pages on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Please share the video pages so other developers can also benefit from the shared knowledge.