plans

Not beholding the fact we haven't published this yet, let me divulge what I
see as "important" for us to achieve.

Ok, to start with, what I think we're doing, and why we're doing it.

We have 2, possibly 3 aims. Firstly, we have to *advocate* the use of php to
people who are previously unaware, or scared, or uninitatiated in the ways
of the PHP. We need to run cases studies, testimonials, bench-marks,
everything that will make php become extremely tempting and exciting to
people previously afraid. We will want to enlist the help of the open source
movement here; this is a good time to *advocate* open source here too.

Secondly, we need to *evangelise* the use of PHP to people who previously
have either started and shy'ed away, or use it badly (and thus blame alot of
the stuff that's going wrong in their scripts on us... an example would
perhaps be the user who has a badly written loop, but doesn't understand
looping, gives up - and blames us for writing bad software). Here, we need
to publish articles, content scriptlets, code snippets, libraries, and
everything else a PHP developer can benefit from, and improve her code by.

Finally, we need to look at producing something that will support all the
PHP user groups, and discussion forums. We want to look at providing them
with webspace, url, etc.

So to achieve this, i think we need to establish a number of websites. (when
i say websites, i'm meaning like pear.php.net / www.php.net  / gtk.php.net
etc are all different sites).

After some discussion in IRC, i think we have chosen usephp.net as an
advocacy site, which can be translated into use.php.net. This should contain
stuff like our case studies, etc, as mentioned above. I am sure we can get
Zend support, and make a nice easy fast site, and have mailing lists, etc.
All the kind of promo stuff we need. We'll need to identify people to manage
stuff like press releases, news, etc.

Secondly, we should create phpwire.[com|net|org] (i prefer org, since it
seems to fit more, but i'm easy), as a portal site for developers. I have
been looking at Netscape's DevEdge (http://developer.netscape.com/), and
that kind of content - style is something we may look to emulate.

Here, i see things like forums, perhaps irc, etc. Fostering a community for
PHP, which is - hopefully - more closer than other projects before.

Finally, we might want to set up the ug network, and have it use a template
system for each UG (and/or offer just plain hosting), as well as a
searchable index.

Now that I suitabley have you all worried, and biting your nails, i'll let
you in on a little secret... we might end up producing similar content to
zend.com . Zend might equally end up choosing to change their site to a more
corporate sales site, and use our evang site. Or not.

What we're not doing i think is making another reference site... what we are
doing, is creating content that doesn't exist yet, within the php.net
sphere.

Anyhow. those are my 2 <insert prefered currency here>.

I'd be interested to have your thoughts.

--
James Cox :: [email protected]
Please CC me when replying to my messages on lists.
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