Top 10 PHP Programming Innovators of 2007 - PHP Classes blog

By Manuel Lemos
manuellemos.net
<email contact>

Contents

* PHP professional profile accesses statistics by e-mail
- Professional profile statistics correction
- Professional skills interface
* Top PHP Programming Award Innovators of the year
- A special prize for the top PHP Programming Award Innovators of the year


* PHP professional profile accesses statistics by e-mail

Before proceeding to the main topic of this article, I just would like to give you an update on the latest enhancements of the PHP professionals directory.

If you have arrived recently to the the PHP Classes site, the PHP professionals directory is a set of pages of the PHP Classes site that lets PHP professionals join to show to interested businesses they are available for hiring.

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

Any PHP professionals may join the directory submitting their profile in this site page:

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

Last month, a new page was made available to let each participating professional know how many distinct users have visited their profile pages, or have visited their professional home page, or requested to contact by e-mail.

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

This month, the site started sending the profile access statistics by e-mail to professionals that have their options set to receive statistics reports this way.

Receiving these e-mail reports is free and optional. You may even choose whether you want to receive these reports every day, or in a specific day of the week. You can change these options in the professional profile page:

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


- Professional profile statistics correction

The PHP Classes site has set robots.txt file to instruct Web crawlers to not access these pages. Unfortunately, not every crawler respects the robots.txt conventions.

Consequently, until a few days ago, the site was accounting accesses performed by Web crawlers, as if they were real users checking the professional profile pages.

The problem is fixed now and crawler accesses were discarded. Therefore, if you have checked your profile statistics lately, you may have observed a number of accesses higher than it really is. Now, the profile statistics pages and report e-mail messages show the correct numbers.

I also would like to remind you, that if you have registered yourself as an available PHP professional but you not had many contacts to hire you, your statistics may improve if you become a premium subscriber.

If you are not aware, premium subscribers appear flagged as featured professionals. Another advantage is that the name and contacts of premium subscribers may appear exposed to any businesses willing to contact and eventually hire them. This increases the chances of business contact you right away when they find your profile.

You may find more about these and other benefits, as well about how to become a premium subscriber in this page:

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


- Professional skills interface

The next enhancement that I plan to release is the ability to let professionals specify the skills that they have, like how many years of PHP experience, databases or frameworks they can work, etc... That will help businesses find professionals with the exact skills that they need.

This feature is partially implemented. It is just not yet made available because it is not ready for use. I expect to release it some time next month.


* Top PHP Programming Award Innovators of the year

As you may know, the PHP Programming Innovation Award is an initiative started by the PHP Classes site in 2004. It is meant to encourage PHP developers to submit more innovative components and share them with other PHP users.

This initiative has been working wonders. Now, the site is publishing more and better components. Sometimes innovative components are very sophisticated and solve complex problems that require high-level knowledge.

Since the beginning, more than 400 packages contributed by over 260 authors have been nominated to the award. Meanwhile I noticed that some authors had their classes nominated more than the average, but I feel the site has not been providing enough recognition to their work.

Therefore, I decided to introduce a new ranking: the award winners ranking. This ranking accounts the number of times that each author had their packages nominated in each year and the rank that they achieved within the packages nominated in the same month.

You can see this new ranking in the Innovation Award Winners page:

http://www.phpclasses.org/winners/

There is a separate ranking for each year. You may also browse other years ranking from the winners main page.


- A special prize for the top PHP Programming Award Innovators of the year

Each month, the authors of all nominated packages may win prizes of their choice from a list of prizes made available by several site sponsors, that include well known and reputed companies that sell products for PHP developers, like: Human Profile, IP2Location, Codegear, JCX Software, ActiveState, Waterproof Software, Zend, NuSphere, PHP Architect, O'Reilly, Packt, SAMS.

http://www.phpclasses.org/award/innovation/#sponsors-and-pri ...

However, I thought that I should provide one special prize at least to the top ranked PHP Programming Award innovators of the year. Therefore, starting from 2007, the top innovator will get an elePHPant plush toy.

If you are not aware, the elePHPant is a creation of Vincent Pontier that has been adopted as PHP mascot. Damien Seguy had the brilliant idea of producing a plush toy based on Vincent creation.

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

I have already ordered several elePHPants to give them away as symbolic prizes to users that make outstanding contributions to the PHP Classes site. That is the case of the top PHP Programming Award Innovators of the year.

Since the year has not ended yet, there are still the December award nominees to be announced. The packages nominated in December will be voted by the users in January. The results of the December award will be announced on February 1st. Then the top PHP Programming Award Innovator of 2007 will be announced too.

As I mentioned, the elePHPant prize is symbolic, but I hope it helps encouraging more developers to keep contributing many innovative components in 2008 and fourth.


If I do not talk with you sooner, I wish you a Merry X-mas and an Happy New Year of 2008.