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"The PHP community is probably the language's greatest feature."
Here's what PHP community icon Cal Evans has to say. Cal Evans is called an icon because he has been ranked as the third most influential member of the community for a long time, first being the father of PHP and second being the PHP community.
After Cal Evans became a programmer, the language he insisted on for the longest time was PHP. In addition to the ease of use of the PHP language itself, the reason why Cal Evans insisted was because of PHP's greatest asset - the community, "so many excellent people can Sit down and share, from core developers to user group leaders to newbies just writing their first 'Hello World' - the PHP community is amazing!"
Cal Evans Source: 7PHP
PHP can definitely be called a huge open source project. It has been commented before that, for a widely used language, the way PHP is managed is unique, even heterogeneous, compared to other open source projects. PHP's governance has grown into something fairly democratic for its size.
Community contributions with few gatekeepers
Like many open source projects that rely on the community, the governance of PHP depends largely on the opinions of the community, especially in the early days of the project, there are developers who commented that there were "almost no gatekeepers" at that time.
Any developer who wants to contribute, basically, as long as the technical function of the contribution can be explained, the code can appear in the code base very quickly. John Coggeshall, a long-time member and active contributor to the PHP community, recalls discussing PHP community governance: "In the early 2000s, if you knew how to do it and made it look reasonable, most of the time your code would be published to new version."
The low threshold of the community may lay hidden dangers for PHP to grow, but in the early days of its birth, this was the right that Rasmus Lerdorf, the father of PHP, opened to everyone, and it was also the reason for the rapid growth of PHP.
Rasmus Lerdorf
In 1994, in order to maintain a personal web page, Rasmus Lerdorf, a little-known programmer at the time, developed a set of simple Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries in C language to track access to Rasmus Lerdorf's online resumes. The set of scripts is named "Personal Home Page Tools", or "PHP Tools" for short.
In June of the following year, Rasmus released the source code for the PHP tool, while allowing and encouraging users to contribute fixes for bugs in the code, and to improve overall.
The other two founders of PHP, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, met Rasmus because they wanted to improve PHP at that time. The Zend company founded by the three later became an indispensable core force in the development of PHP.
Rasmus made it extensible soon after releasing the source code of "PHP Tools", and in September 1995 released his own work using FI (short for "Forms Interpreter"), covering some of the basic functions of PHP as we know it today, such as something like Perl variables, automatic interpretation of form variables, HTML embedding syntax, etc. In April 1996, Rasmus released the second generation of PHP/FI, combining the previous version names, and began the real evolution of PHP from a set of tools to a programming language.
In November 1997, PHP/FI 2.0 was released. At that time, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, who were still studying at the Haifa Institute of Technology in Israel, needed to use PHP/FI 2.0 to develop a back-end for e-commerce applications. They found PHP/FI 2.0 to be inefficient and lacking in functionality, and started a complete rewrite of the underlying interpreter, and they reached out to Rasmus online to discuss a redevelopment of PHP.
So far, the three veterans of PHP have gathered.
By 1999, the Zend company, which merged the names of Zeev and Andi, was formed. Zend has been a source of innovation and development for PHP since its inception, making core improvements as well as contributions to userspace packages and frameworks, development environment tools, and more.
Investing in the PHP community is investing in yourself
Looking through the remarks of important figures in the PHP community, many people mentioned a very important point when giving advice - go to various conferences and community circles. Someone interviewed many PHP contributors and came to the conclusion that investing in the PHP community is investing in yourself.
Cal Evans even offers a very "practical" piece of advice: If you stick with a conference for two years, you'll be able to submit a presentation and become a speaker in the third year.
PHP has a large number of conferences and communities around the world. The first global PHP conference was held in Japan, and since then, the practice of holding international PHP conferences has continued. In addition, regional PHP conferences are held in many parts of the world, and many PHP contributors start their careers at these conferences.
In the PHP community, developers are encouraged to do what they want . Cal Evans has mentioned that in his PHP community he would openly reject any power-seeking leader, no matter how the power-seeking mentality manifests itself. In his view, no leader has enough power to tell him that he needs to reject someone's leadership. "Most of us are adults and can make our own decisions."
At the same time, he advises others not to rely on leaders or individuals when trying to make a decision. "Anyone trying to tell you how to treat a community member, be very careful. Find it yourself, decide for yourself... The PHP community is up to you, let It becomes the right community for you. ”
The learning curve of PHP goes hand-in-hand with the ethos of the community. Although PHP is considered "too simplistic" and cannot be compared with mature programming languages such as Java. However, PHP as a language is very flexible, easy to learn and you can shape anything you want with it.
Michelangelo van Dam, who was once the fourth most influential developer in the PHP community, is a developer who has made the switch from Java and Perl to PHP. After getting his hands on PHP and learning about its power, he was involved in using PHP to run faster, more stable, and scalable applications, and to replace most existing Java backends, "at the beginning of this millennium. Over the years, I developed a passion for PHP and realized that there are no challenges that PHP can't solve."
There are downsides to PHP's flexibility, as Michelangelo van Dam points out, when people do what they want and there's no such thing as a "one way" to do things, everyone can pick up the language and claim they're PHP pros.
John Coggeshall has made a similar point, arguing that democracy inevitably brings some chaos, "PHP governance is still a messy endeavor, and there is constant conflict between various camps of thought about how the language should evolve."
But on the whole, the developers of the PHP community are very supportive of their language. Compared with "PHP is the best language in the world", another comment may be more appropriate: "The PHP community is the most generous community, people share Knowledge, mutual help, passion and freedom to promote PHP careers.”
List of PHP Community Meetings Source: php.net
Year 26, talk about reality
While the PHP community is by and large a place where developers can feel comfortable and grow, power generation alone is never a wise choice.
The trigger for PHP community members to start looking for change was the departure of Nikita Popov. In 2011, while still in high school, Nikita began to study PHP, making her first contribution in PHP 5.5.
Nikita Popov 图源：JetBrains
Over the next 10 years, Nikita implemented many features for PHP. In 2016, Nikita joined JetBrains and made many contributions to the three major versions of PHP 7.4, 8.0, and 8.1. However, Nikita is also a contributor to Rust and LLVM. On December 1st, Nikita left JetBrains and significantly reduced the time she spent on PHP.
As a key contributor to PHP, Nikita's old club, JetBrains is very saddened by Nikita's departure, "Losing one of PHP's key contributors is a blow to the community... Nikita's departure puts the PHP language that powers 78% of the web in a vulnerable position. not to mention that this is an overwhelming burden for other maintainers. Unfortunately, in the world of OSS, this often leads to burnout.”
Another PHP contributor, Joe Watkins , commented that "there are parts of the PHP source code that only a few people understand" and that the future of the language depends on two people, Dmitry Stogov and Nikita Popov . This is common in most open source communities - a few developers actually influence the direction of the entire project. Therefore, every open source community hopes to expand the community as much as possible and make the community as stable as possible.
After much thought, JetBrains decided to take the lead in building a solid foundation for PHP. The Geek-like JetBrains company is also an important contributor to PHP, providing positions for many engineers who focus on the PHP language and ecology. JetBrains also plans to donate $100,000 annually to the PHP Foundation.
On November 22, 2021, the PHP Foundation was established, with startup members including Zend, Laravel, Acquia, Automattic, Craft CMS, Private Packagist, Tideways, PrestaShop, and Symfony. One of the main goals of the PHP Foundation is to provide funding and support for the continued development of the PHP programming language.
"We don't expect an immediate change in the way PHP is developed," Benmoshe said. "Over time, foundation management will formalize future workflows with the help of the PHP community. However, the priority at this time is to hire and support more core developers."
Built through the Open Collective , the PHP Foundation is expected to raise approximately $300,000 per year, with transparency in raising and managing funds. Since its inception, 1088 people have donated funds.
With more than 6 million developers, PHP is fighting back against the unofficial slogan: "Dying since 1995."