Latest PHP news in the site newsletter and comp.lang.php newsgroup to be approved with your help - PHP Classes blog

By Manuel Lemos
manuellemos.net
<email contact>

Hello,

Finally I implemented something that I have been willing to have for a long time. I have just include in the PHP Classes site newsletter the head lines of the latest PHP news that were released in several other sites.

So, now everybody subscribed to the site newsletter can be kept up to date with the latest news in the PHP world without having to keep polling many sites to know if any interesting news were released.

This addition to the site newsletter was made possible thanks to the cooperation of the CodingTheWeb.com site that provided the news feed aggregating news articles from several sources that are popular sites in the PHP community.

As usual, you may see a preview of the site newsletter already with this new news feed here:

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


Another issue that is not really related with the PHP Classes site but is very important for the recognition of PHP as a language well supported within the programming community, is the fact that finally a newsgroup named comp.lang.php is about to be voted for approval in the Usenet.

For those that do not know what this means, Usenet is probably the oldest network of discussion groups distributed over the Internet. It has several hierarchies of groups but only the Big 8 are well distributed among ISPs. The comp hierarchy is one of the Big 8 hierarchies.

There are already the alt.php, alt.php.sql and the alt.comp.lang.php news groups but the alt hierarchy is not one of the Big 8 hierarchies and so it is not so widely available as the comp hierarchy. There are also several regional PHP newsgroups that are even less well distributed.

The official mailing lists maintained by the PHP Group are also available via NNTP but AFAIK no ISP redistributes those news groups.

Having a PHP newsgroup sub-hierarchy under comp.lang.php is not just a matter of having a better distributed hierarchy of PHP news groups. It is also a matter of status for PHP as well recognized language.

If you go to Google and see the list of languages under the comp.lang hierarchy, you see there 55 languages and none of them is PHP, as if PHP would be such a minor language that would not justify a hierarchy for itself.

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&group=comp.lang

So, it is very important for PHP and all of those that work with it, that the comp.lang.php group just submitted for voting becomes approved.

The Call For votes message was posted here:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1023125386.82479%40isc. ...

So, all you need to do to contribute to the process of approval is to send a message to vote@technopagan.org with the text "I vote YES on comp.lang.php" in the body of the message.

Eventually this link will help you do it without much effort:

mailto:vote@technopagan.org?Body=I%20vote%20YES%20on%20comp.lang.php

Of course, you should only vote YES if you agree with the creation of the news group, but as subscriber of the PHP Classes site I assume that you most likely agree that it is a good idea.

In the name of the PHP community, thank you for your cooperation.

Regards, Manuel Lemos

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