PHP professionals map gadget and the profile statistics page - PHP Classes blog

By Manuel Lemos
manuellemos.net
<email contact>

Contents

- Planet ProPHP aggregates PHP blogs from Brazilians
- PHP professionals map in iGoogle, Google Maps, your site and Google Earth
- Professional profile access statistics
- More PHP professional directory features to come


- Planet ProPHP aggregates PHP blogs from Brazilians

Before the usual batch of news about the latest PHPClasses site enhancements, I would like to let you know something of interest, especially to bloggers from Brazil that write articles about PHP.

The ProPHP - Group of Professionals from Brazil - is launching today a PHP blog aggregator site. The idea is to aggregate blogs from PHP professionals that work in Brazil.

The ProPHP aggregator accepts posts in either Portuguese or English. The posts must be only about PHP or related matters. If you work as a PHP professional in Brazil, feel free to visit the Planet ProPHP site and submit your PHP blog if you have one.

http://planet.prophp.com.br/

The aggregator software is the same used by the Planet PHP site, which is also available in a SubVersion repository of the same site.

http://www.planet-php.net/

You may want to check it out if you would like to build a similar blog aggregator in for PHP professionals in your country. If you do that, you may want to consider submitting it to the directory of regional PHP user groups in the PHPClasses site:

http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/group/


- PHP professionals map in iGoogle, Google Maps, your site and Google Earth

The PHPClasses is now making available a Google gadget with the map of PHP professionals. The gadget attempts to guess your country and automatically show all PHP professionals from that country in a map.

You can use the gadget to show in your iGoogle page by going here:

http://fusion.google.com/add?moduleurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.phpc ...

You can also display the PHP professionals as a mapplet in your My Maps page in the Google Maps site by going here:

http://maps.google.com/ig/add?synd=mpl&pid=mpl&moduleurl=htt ...

If you want to use this gadget in your own site, go here to let Google generate the necessary HTML tags:

http://gmodules.com/ig/creator?synd=open&url=http%3A%2F%2Fww ...

Finally, if you would like to import the PHP Professionals locations and see them in Google Earth, just download this KML file:

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

You can find any of these links in the PHP professionals pages:

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


- Professional profile access statistics

The PHP professionals directory service is free, but if you pay to become a premium subscriber you get priority exposure.

Several users have written praising the initiative of giving PHP professionals the opportunity to advertise their availability for taking PHP jobs.

In just one month, about 700 PHP professionals from near 100 countries have joined this PHP Professionals directory.

That is great, but some developers questioned the fact of whether it is worth paying the premium subscription fee in order to increase the chances getting hired. That is a fair question.

To address this issue, I was just launched the professional profile access statistics page:

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

This page shows you how many times your professional profile page was accessed, and most importantly, how many times your professional home page was visited, as well how many users requested your e-mail contact.

What you can do to determine whether becoming a premium subscriber is worth the additional exposure to get more PHP jobs, you can go to the premium services page and just request a free trial subscription:

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

You will be able to get the same benefits of an actual premium subscriber for a few days. After that period you can compare your profile access statistics numbers before and after becoming a premium subscriber.

Keep in mind that depending on the demand of PHP professionals in your country, it may take a while until you get a PHP job due to the exposure provided by the PHP professionals directory. So, please be patient.


- More PHP professional directory features to come

The PHP professional directory is an initiative that keeps being improved. There are some important features to be implemented soon, like the ability to let the professionals specify which skills they have. That will help businesses easily find only the professionals that have skills that match their needs.

Other than that, if you have more ideas about how this initiative could evolve to make it a better means to bring together more PHP professionals and businesses willing to hire them, feel free to post your comments, questions, criticisms, etc..