Launched the PHP Professionals Directory - PHP Classes blog

By Manuel Lemos
manuellemos.net
<email contact>

Contents

- More PHP conferences
- PHP Professionals Directory
- How does it work?
- Becoming a featured professional
- Future developments
* Better professional location selection
* Detailed skills profile
* Search by skills
* Other features you may suggest


- More PHP conferences

Before I move on to the main subject of this post, as usual, I would like to let you know about some PHP events that may interest you.

We are already near the end of another great year for PHP. At this time of the year, many PHP conferences happen throughout the world. Let me just mention a few that I will be attending.

I have just returned from Borcon 2007 Brazil, a developers conference that Borland/CodeGear organized in São Paulo, Brazil. It was a fully packed conference for developers that are interested in Borland products, such as Delphi for PHP.

I attended Borcon 2007 Brazil as a speaker. I gave a talk about the PHP state in the present and the future ahead. It was interesting to notice great interest on PHP from people that have never developed anything in this language but became very interested due to the increasing popularity of the language.

Later on November 24th I will be giving the same talk at the PHP Now event organized the Brazilian National Laboratory of Scientific Computing in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro. I will also give another talk there about developing sustainable sites for developer communities presenting the PHPClasses as a case study.

http://www.lncc.br/phpnow

A week later after that event, I also be speaking at the PHP Conference Brasil 2007 in Osasco, São Paulo . PHP Conference Brasil 2006 was a great success for a first edition. It received over 520 attendants. This year, a place was booked for the event with enough space to receive 1000 attendants.

http://www.prophp.com.br/phpconference/2007/

In this event the ProPHP, group of PHP professionals of Brazil will be presenting the elePHPant, the brilliant PHP plush mascot project mentored by Damien Seguy of Nexen.

http://www.nexen.net/elephpant/index.php

This year I will be talking about principles of defensive programming in PHP. It is basically a live presentation of the topics that I covered in these popular PHP Classes site blog posts:

http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/65-8-defensive-programmi ...

http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/66-More-defensive-progra ...

If you are Brazilian or you happen to be in the neighborhood, feel free to meet me at these events.


- PHP Professionals Directory

It has been a long while since I started noticing a great demand for PHP professionals. For instance, I receive many job proposals but, unfortunately, I have to decline all of them because I work full time in the PHP Classes site.

Often I thinking about forwarding the proposals that I get to other people I know and recommend, but that would not be the same thing for companies willing to hire me, as I may recommend people that do not match exactly the profile that those companies expect.

So, I thought to myself, instead of recommending people, I could provide a place where available PHP professionals looking for work could list. Then companies can look up the list of available professionals and contact them directly.

The PHP Professionals directory main page is:

http://www.phpclasses.org/professionals/


- How does it work?

A PHP professionals directory sounded like a great idea but it would also take me a lot of work to implement all that I have in mind.

Therefore, I decided to invest a lot of time in creating a PHP professionals directory and provide it as a free service but with interesting benefits for premium subscribers.

It works like this: everybody can submit their profile in this page:

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

Every kind of PHP professional can submit your profile. You do not need to be necessarily a developer. Maybe you are a Web designer or a system administrator with PHP skills. There is plenty of demand for this kind of PHP professionals too.

If you are not just an individual professional but you have a consulting business composed by a team of developers, Web designers, system administrators, etc.., you can submit your profile too. Just enter you company name in the business name field.

The profile submission form lets you point exactly where you base office is located in a map. The geographic coordinates will be used to let the potential employers in your region know that you are available for hire.

Many companies prefer to hire local professionals because it is eventually less expensive for them. Working near the offices of your employers also allows you to provide better assistance then if you were working remotely, as you can attend in place meetings or even provide training.

Once you submit your profile you become listed for free in a page of the directory dedicated to your country.

Professionals that are premium subscribers will be listed with priority as featured professionals. The country professionals listing appears sorted by their geographic distance to the country capital city. Featured professionals appear first and always before any non-featured professional regardless of their location.

Each professional has a dedicated profile page where his details appear listed. However, non-featured professionals appear with their contact details obfuscated. The name of the city and the geographic location on the map is always exposed even for non-featured professionals, so the potential employers know where you are.

Only other premium subscribers can have access to the details of non-featured professionals such as the address, phone, e-mail and home page addresses.


- Becoming a featured professional

To become a featured professional is very easy: just pay for a premium subscription going here:

http://www.phpclasses.org/premium/

Being a premium subscriber is very inexpensive. It costs no more than USD $5 a month. If for some reason you cannot pay to become a premium subscriber, you can still benefit from being listed in the professionals directory because potential employers can become premium subscribers to be able to see your whole profile and get your contacts to eventually hire you.

If you would like to try before you buy a premium subscription, you may request a trial subscription from the premium services page mentioned above. It allows you try the premium services for free during 7 days.

Another way to become premium subscriber for free is to be nominated for the PHP Programming Innovation Award. All nominees get a free lifetime premium subscription as a sign of gratitude from the PHP Classes site for contributing innovative work.

http://www.phpclasses.org/award/innovation


- Future developments

This is just the first release of the PHP Professionals directory service. I have planned for many other great features but it will take me some time to implement all.

Hopefully, the additional revenue generated by this initiative will help me continue to dedicate more time improving the benefits that it will provide to the PHP professionals.


* Better professional location selection

Right now, you need to browse the map to point exactly where you live. This may not be easy if you do not know the world map very well.

The user group submission page has a better way to find and locate your city in the map. I intend to adapt it to the professional profile page as I did not yet have had the time to do it.

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


* Detailed skills profile

As you may have noticed, there is no way to submit your resume or portfolio. For now, you can use the the home page field to specify the URL of a page where the potential employers may learn more about your skills and experience.

This may be good enough for now, but I wanted to allow professionals to detail more about specific skills like: how many years of PHP experience they have, what operating systems, databases, frameworks, IDE they have experience, etc...

I have that all figured out. So it will be made available in the next release.


* Search by skills

Once I provide a way to allow professionals to detail their skills, then potential employers may narrow their search by professionals with the desired profile, even expanding their search to professionals from other countries.


* Other features you may suggest

I must admit I am very excited with these developments. The PHPClasses site is visited in average by 15.000 users every day. I am sure this initiative will address the needs of many professionals and eventual employers.

But I would like to go further and address needs that I have not thought about yet. This initiative is for you that work with PHP on a daily basis. Therefore I would like to invite you to contribute with suggestions to make this an even greater PHP resource. All you need to do is to submit a comment to this post with your comments, suggestions, criticisms.