I love PHP Classes but the site is a mess.

So, where I should start?.

I am been a PHP classes users since for more than 15 years (sadly, I lost my first account when I changed job).

a) the design. boxed and really dated. I have visited this site for a long gone and the design hasn't changed in a decade.

b) It lacks a lot of functionalities while others are broken. For example, I have a lot of automatic emails in my inbox that I can't mark as read (unless I open one by one) and I can't delete a single one. Sheesh.

c) Even the sitemap is wrong (duplicates entries).


I'm glad for the weekly emails and it shows that apparently the site is still alive and kicking. Otherwise, I would have moved elsewhere (where?.)

We need to do something and when I say, "we", I say that I can help directly. However, apparently nobody is reading the forum.

Thank you for the feedback. Let me clarify a few points that seem to not be clear.

a) Regarding the design, I agree it needs to be update. Unfortunately it is not that simple. There was a contest in 2010 and a new design was picked from many that were voted in designs submitted by the users.

However I the users only submitted new designs when a money prize was offered of $3000.

Later there was a redesign done by a site developer that improved it a bit but then he disappeared and did not fix a few bugs that remained. I suspect that the designer is dead because he stopped participating in Facebook in 2016.

We asked another designer to work with us one a design imprvements but he did not reply. I suspect he did not like to do the job maybe because he needed to fix CSS and HTML templates rather than just do a PhotoShop mockup and had another person to convert to CSS.

b) Regarding the mailbox mark all features as read I agree but that is one of many improvements that need to be addressed and that would only a affect a minority of users that get mailbox messages. Still we want to fix that issues. We just cannot promise when it will be done.

c) As for the sitemap I am not aware of that issue. We submit sitemaps to Google and they do not notice any sitemap errors. Can you be more specific and give an example?

Regarding help, for now we cannot afford paying for any external help as we have invested our time and money in the the production of elePHPants that he had great demand from site users willing to pay.

But if you want you can propose a new site design, there is a new design proposal system that you can visit going to the page below.

phpclasses.org/design.html

We had already other developers looking into that, so it would be nice if you could collaborate with your proposal.

Later we plan to launch a new design contest when we can fund a good money prize.

As for reading the forum you are right. In the last 3 years we have been working on a course to help everybody willing to create a new business, so everybody can be happy working on an area of their vocation and making good money out of their work.

This course will be launched in 2019. Meanwhile we are getting back reading and reply to messages like yours regarding the site problems.

So if you have any other ideas or problems you noticed, your feedback is well appreciated.

In 2019 we will be helping all developers that want to make more money to achieve that. So stay tuned to the upcoming developments.

For now please reply to the questions above so we can understand the issues.

Thanks again for your time and patience.

Right now, The design is not an issue. Everybody could buy a design from $5-$15 bucks (wrapbootstrap, themeforest...), some of them are for free.

However, integrating it could be expensive. Is this site a Brazilian site?. An average programmer in Brazil earns around $3000 USD per month (afaik, the salaries are similar than my country). It is still expensive, but it is less expensive than in the US of A, where the wages are around $7k-10k. So, let's say that you hire somebody to rebuild the site, it could take 3-6 months or around 9.000USD-36.000USD.

Now, you say that PHPClasses doesn't have working capital to invest in it. It is not an issue. There is a strategy called "Blue Ocean", Cirque du Soleil is the example of it: how to start a cirque without funds, animal or rings?. Well, they could.

PHPClasses has competitor?. Well, there are some around here, Facebook's groups (that are crap), Reddit, StackOverflow (but it is not social) and a few ones. So, PHPClasses lacks a serious contended; ergo it's ideal for Blue Ocean.

But, back to the topic, PHPClasses doesn't have the money to invest and need to spend money on flipping the site. What it could do?. Hiring is out of the discussion. It could create a partnership, pay with shares or do other business deal without putting money on the table. I worked in two Startups, and I earned shares. For me, it was a good deal because I sold them and I made more money than to ask for a fixed wage, and I am talking about startups. It was a win-win for everybody, I earned more, and the startup has it's a product without creating debts. Accountability and legal works are tedious, but it must be done anyways.

And, why PHPClasses must do that?. Money.
Let's say that the site is in good shape (a site with a proper SEO strategy); then it could bring money thanks to ads, new channels of incomes and find new investors, Venture Capital or Angel Investor.

I smell money but PHPClasses must get serious.

Yes, I know the Blue Ocean strategy and I have actually reviewed that book here in the site 10 years ago.

phpclasses.org/reviews/id/159139619 ...

The PHP Classes site was always a bootstrapped, I mean it never needed funds to be developed. Part of the money that was invested in the site was earned was reinvested to develop the site further.

Investment could be useful but it would also mean losing control to investors that sometimes do not know much of the PHP community and would probably make it fail. That is why I never seeked investment.

As for the current funds, we do have money to invest, it is just that investing on Web Design is not a priority because it is an expense that we can hardly justify in terms of immediate return in the form of revenue.

We will certainly revisit that topic in the future because we want to update the design but we need to pay fairly to a good designer to do it.

Anyway we have invested in the development of a better e-commerce system that allowed us to charge for shipping elePHPants. Before we could not charge for shipping because the we only used to sell virtual services. Now we are selling elePHPants too and we have great demand for that too.

Other than that I agree we you. We will be working on a new project to generate money not only for the site but also to developers like yourself that may have their own projects but need more channels to market and sell those products. If you have such products, please contact us sending a message to info@phpclasses.org .

As for SEO we have actually developed a tool that helps us to get to number 1 in Google much faster than doing it manually. We plan to start selling it to the English speaking market soon.

phpclasses.org/blog/post/544-Boosti ...

As for ads we will very likely abandon them soon or later. We would rather advertise the products and services that we sell that were done either by us or by partners.

Anyway, I would like to thank you for sharing your comments. If you have other comments please post them here as well.

I think design is far less important than quality of ideas.
Manuel said long time ago that there is lack of whole site packages.

I made one (zip < 100 kB and with lot adds (not tutorials) < 2.5 MB) https://www.phpclasses.org/package/10997-PHP-PHP-code-skeleton-named-B12phpfw-every-code-skele.html.

But nobody is here to aprove it. Lack of stuff or ... ?

Download 2.5 MB from https://github.com/slavkoss/fwphp is bad idea, but you do this. This should be changed prior than design.

Yes, you are right. This package has been in the queue for far too long. Please accept my apologies for the delay.

Sometimes the greatest difficulty is know understand exactly the package does.

Anyway I will try to look into it today to see if I understand what it does and will approve it if I can understand it. Otherwise I will contact you to clarify what it does.

Today I need to finish a new feature that will help contributors like yourself to promote the best blog articles that have raised more interest from the developers that visit the site. This will help the more interesting package to get more visibility.

Currently Hackathons are pretty popular.
Maybe you need one - for redesigning - this website.

And for finding a premium or platin sponsor for you.

Not only on this site, but also elsewhere, I noticed issues with terminology. What is what. File, Class, Project, Package, Distribution, Source, Build, Packager, Generator, Release

Phar, Phive, Composer - did Pear become deprecated?

I think with the hypes around Go Lang, Node Js, some php projects and tools stopped.

Tools that used to work, stop working.
Instructions like
curl -O phive.phar https://phar.io/releases/phive.phar
may not work.
First: URLs are getting redirected to github:
curl https://phar.io/releases/phive.phar
Forwarded to https://github.com/phar-io/phive/releases/download/0.13.2/phive-0.13.2.phar
Second: The github may redirect an URL to Amazon

curl https://github.com/phar-io/phive/releases/download/0.13.2/phive-0.13.2.phar
<html><body>You are being <a href="https://github-production-release-asset-2e65be.s3.amazonaws.com/31674534/04998680-faac-11e9-87d1-3a90ceae0228?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&amp;X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWNJYAX4CSVEH53A%2F20200407%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&amp;X-Amz-Date=20200407T221012Z&amp;X-Amz-Expires=300&amp;X-Amz-Signature=0b38f24680bf408e3fe7650f8b7e1b06a03d4889f50bf00c56557d67081d8f83&amp;X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&amp;actor_id=0&amp;response-content-disposition=attachment%3B%20filename%3Dphive-0.13.2.phar&amp;response-content-type=application%2Foctet-stream">redirected</a>.</body></html>

Maybe my curl is out of date!

I love PHP - just - I m missing a proper eco system.

Hello Mat,

Sorry for the delay. I was waiting to finish implementing a new site redesign to reply to your comment.

I have some good news for all.

I have just published the first changes of new site redesign. I found a person that have vocation for redoing the site design to make it more modern.

It is not yet fully implemented but you can see already the main changes in the site pages headers and footers. I will integrate the rest of the changes in the next days.

As for other projects that stopped I cannot tell what happened because I have no contact with the people in charge of them.

What I can tell about PHP Classes is that it never stopped. I also plan to resume JS Classes soon but I do not have an estimate of when it will happen.

Anyway, the other good news is that we are close to start integrating products and services of other developers that want us to advertise and sell them in the upcoming PHP Marketplace. That is the plan that I made several years in the past, and it is finally going to happen.

All good things take time to happen. We took more than 1 year to launch the PHP elePHPant mascot that we have for sale. We delivered many of them already around the world and we will continue to deliver them.

The marketplace will be different. It will be more about digital products and services developed by developers like yourself for other developers that need them.

We will provide free mentoring to developers that do not yet have products for sale.

First we will launch products that we have already in the queue to integrate in the marketplace.

This way we will fund the site development and at the same time we will help more PHP developers to live only from the sales of their products.

Stay tuned for an announcement about this in the next weeks.

Furthermore, I would like to know your sincere opinion about the site redesign. Is there anything else you would like to be improved?