20 Years of PHP Classes and Future Plans

In this article:

Summary Video

20 Years Today

Buy PHP elePHPants with a Special Birthday Discount

Future Plans

Give Back to the Community and Delegate Work

Help Developers Making More Money From Their Work

Marketplace of Solutions for PHP Developers

Personal Vocation Tool to Help Finding the Area that You Love More

Personal Compatibility Tool to Help Finding the Developer Partner that You Will Love

Business Creation Course

Personal Vocation Tool to Help Finding the Area that You Love More

Personal Compatibility Tool to Help Finding the Developer Partner that You Will Love

Business Creation Course

Looking for Partners for the Business Creation Course

Updated Web Site Design

Other Suggestions You May HaveLooking for Partners for the Business Creation Course

Updated Web Site Design

Other Suggestions You May Have

How Can You Help?

Help Funding the Future Development Faster Buying PHP ElePHPants and Premium Subscriptions

Spread the Word About the Future Developments

Summary Video

20 Years Today

It is with great happiness that I announce that 20th anniversary of the PHP Classes site. Against all odd this is a site that did not imagine to reach this day when I started in in June 24 of 1999.

The site went a long way, passed over 1.5 million registered users of which over 4000 became contributors. It is a huge community that contributes to the site every day.

None of this would have been possible without the collaboration of everybody that shared their work with the site users.

So congratulations should go to all of us that believe that collaborating is better than competing.

On my behalf I would like to thank to all of you for all these years that I learned so much about building collaborative communities.

But the work is never done. There will be a lot more upcoming. Keep reading below to learn about the future plans.

Buy PHP elePHPants with a Special Birthday Discount

To get started with the celebration I would like to give all of you a special gift. It is not much but is something that we can give within the limitations of the site budget.

As you may know, since earlier this year the PHP Classes site is selling the original elePHPant. This is the PHP mascot plush toy that was created by the well known French designer Vincent Pointier that created a lovely mascot for this language that we all love.

We got a license from Vincent to produce these elePHPants in a local factory that has worked together to create a prototype and improved it until Vincent was pleased with the results.

We need to pay royalties for each elePHPant that we sell, which is only fair because we all need to honour the creator of the elePHPant design.

It was an hard and long process but the elePHPant is now ready to sell. Several PHP developers already bought it but only now we will advertising its wide availability.

To celebrate the PHP Classes 20th anniversary we are making available a discount coupon for a limited period of time of 15%.

The profit of the elePHPant sales will be used to reinvest on the future developments of the site as I describe below.

So if you want to buy one or more elePHPants, please go ahead in the elePHPants shopping section page of the site and enter the discount coupon code below:

Click Here to Buy the PHP elePHPant

15% Discount coupon code: ETERNALPHP20YRS

Future Plans

Give Back to the Community and Delegate Work

Over the years a lot was done on the PHP Classes site but most of its development was done by me. This limited what was achieved. There is an old saying: if you want to go fast, go alonem but if you want to go far go with others.

Therefore we are now delegating more work to other developers that have collaborated with the PHP Classes site in the past. Of course we will be paying for all the outsourced work.

We are starting small and have already delegated a few tasks to a few developers. If you are interested in doing at least part of the work, please contact me on Facebook Messenger so we can evaluate your skills so you can be considered to do the necessary work. If you are not yet my friend in Facebook, please go to my Facebook profile and add me there. If you do not use Facebook, please use the contact link below to send a message by email.

Help Developers Making More Money From Their Work

Over the years the PHP Classes site helped many developers make more money indirectly. Some used PHP packages shared by others in the site, thus doing their work in less time, others applied to jobs posted in the site.

Now the site will be going to provide more direct means to help developers make more money from the site. Read the sections below to understand how.

Marketplace of Solutions for PHP Developers

As we announced previously, the PHP Classes site shopping section will be used to sell products and services for other PHP developers.

We learned from many people that they are not comfortable with advertising and selling the software or training courses that they developed. This is due to the fact that they do not have a natural vocation for selling. If this happens to you, do not worry, this is normal. Just focus on the development of those solutions and then we will focus on advertising your solutions in our site pages, newsletters and social network accounts so we can generate more revenue for you.

We will get back to this soon but if you are interested to have your products and services for PHP developers be made available in the upcoming PHP Classes Marketplace, please contact us the contact link below, or send me a message via Facebook Messenger adding me as friend on Facebook.

Personal Vocation Tool to Help Finding the Area that You Love More

As I commented above, not every everybody has vocation to work on advertising and sales. Different people have different vocations.

This means that if you work on an area that is not your vocation, you may even try for a while but soon or later you will give up because you will not be motivated.

On the other hand if you work on an area that is your vocation you will be very motivated and will do your work faster.

I know for a fact that I have vocation for scientific research, as to advertising, sales, administration, psychology and a bunch of other areas that I could also do well if I learned about them or worked on them in practice.

Therefore I developed an application that will give you a list of areas of vocation that you may also do well and be very motivated if you will work on them.

For the last year or so I have shown this application to tens of people that it works well. Testing with many different people is part of the scientific method to prove a theory.

So now the application was outsourced to a developer that has natural vocation to develop projects faster so you will have access to both a mobile and a Web version of the application in the next weeks.

This will be useful for you so you can learn what is the best area of vocation so you can work on developing products and services for that area with great motivation and speed. 

Personal Compatibility Tool to Help Finding the Developer Partner that You Will Love

One way to develop products or services faster is to work in teams rather than doing it alone all by yourself. Teaming with the right partners is the way to go to work on projects that can finish in less time because different people will work on different parts of the project.

However, it will only work well if team members are compatible. When people are not compatible, they may end up fighting and splitting before the project is finished.

To avoid that problem we will make available a tool that will help you to determine if another person could be a good partner so you will hardly ever split.

This tool will be made available together with the vocation tool that will be launched in the next weeks.

Business Creation Course

The PHP Classes site was launched in 1999 but it only became my full time business in 2001 when my son was born. It took me like 1 year or so to start generating revenue but since then it has been working with ups and downs but it is still alive and working well serving a large community.

This allowed me to do many great things in life including attending all the school presentations and parties of my son, traveling around the world, meeting many great people, as well doing all the normal things people do in life like eating, sleeping having fun with my family and friends and still have time to work a lot.

This has been a great privilege that I would like to share with all of you because I am very grateful for all these years that I have been working with all that I love.

Therefore in 2015 I decided to give back to all of you by launching a business creation course that I have been working since then.

The course will be ready in the next months and will be made available probably in a separate site and I will launch but it will share a lot of the code that was used in PHP Classes to implement the gamification resources that it provides like missions, levels, badges, challenges, etc.. to make the learning experience useful and fun.

Meanwhile you may watch this old video of myself giving a presentation on reasons that you should create a business selling products and services developed by yourself. Please excuse me for using old man clothes. Nowadays I use more modern clothes thank to the advice of my wife Glaucia Felisbino that I met after I recorded this video.

Looking for Partners for the Business Creation Course

The business creation course is a huge project. I will not be able to work on it alone because it is very ambitious. I will start launching it in Brazil where I live but it will be managed by my wife Glaucia Felisbino.

It is a bit too soon but I would love to take it to other countries that speak other languages besides Portuguese which is my mother language.

If you are interested to collaborate, please contact us the contact link below, or send me a message via Facebook Messenger adding me as friend on Facebook.

Updated Web Site Design

Once in a while we get requests to update the site design to something more modern. We agree that is about time that the site gets a new design that people like it more.

The site had a design contest in the past that was great because it allowed everybody that care to propose new designs and at the same time it gave a chance to everybody to vote on a design that they like better.

So we plan to repeat this kind of contest although we do not have an accurate estimate of when it will happen because we want to be will funded to give nice money prizes to the winning design, as well nice prizes to the best competitors that do not win. Maybe this will only happen in 2020.

Other Suggestions You May Have

We are aware there will always be plenty of room for improvement in the PHP Classes but we do not have the monopoly of creativity nor we are aware of all the needs and desires of PHP Classes users.

So if you would like to suggest an important improvement not mentioned above, just let us know by commenting below in the article comment box section.

How Can You Help?

Help Funding the Future Development Faster Buying PHP ElePHPants and Premium Subscriptions

The work on the PHP Classes site needs to be done but it will take somebody's time. One way to do it faster so we can all benefit of what is planned is to fund the site development buying something that it is currently selling.

The site has been self-funded since it was started. This means that initially I invested some money to make it work but then with the revenue that it generated we started reinvested on the site growth.

So the only investors that the site had were customers. Some paid for ad spaces, others bought premium subscriptions to get early access to remote job postings and more recently PHP elePHPants.

We plan remove ad spaces that present irrelevant ads because we are aware that some people do not like them. You can already avoid seeing ads by buying a premium subscription but as we implement the new forms of revenue mentioned above, we will remove all the remaining spaces with irrelevant ads.

So for now you help funding the site development by buying either an elePHPant or a premium subscription by going here:

Buy a PHP elePHPant

Buy a Premium Subscription

Spread the Word About the Future Developments

Another means for you help is to spread the word about these developments. I am sure you know a lot of other PHP developers.

If you tell them about the benefits that the site is providing to all PHP developers, I am sure that at least some of them will be interested to learn what is going on.

Just share with them the [link to this post] and they will eventually learn about all the details about the present and future plans for this great site community that I am happy to have founded for the benefit of all of us.

Keep sending your comments, opinions, criticisms, etc. because they are all well appreciated.