Pear or e-xoops?

I figure that PEAR does little to demonstrate PHP or attract
attention. Smarty does a little more. Content management systems (CMS)
do a lot more. If the best PHP talent grabbed a project such as
e-xoops and gave it the attention given to PEAR, the end result would
draw a lot more sites to PHP.

The next draw card would be an office automation project. People would
replace Microsoft Exchange and products similar to Footprints if one
of the three major PHP based contenders had great support from people
with excellent knowledge of PHP programming.

The third best project would be to replace Outlook with a PHP-GTK
based equivalent which could talk SOAP or similar to the office
automation project.

Many of these projects start with good intentions. Few of the leaders
know how to code for large projects. Their projects become too big for
linear code. Their switch to object oriented code comes to late to
easily replace their legacy code. The project stalls and is replaced
by a new project. Unfortunately the developer base is then divided
between two projects.

With PHP5 on the way, the projects will have an even harder time
keeping up to date.

This leaves PHP with great examples of custom code and proprietary
code. The synop.com products come to mind. PHP has popular examples of
open source projects but not popular examples of great open source
code.

Part of "selling" PHP5 will be to get one of the open source CMS
projects converted to the best features of PHP5 using a consistent and
advanced approach so the product will handle large scale sites.

Peter