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10 Pieces of PHP Developer Advice in 2022: Advice #1: Be a Good Community Member Sharing Your Open Source Work in Community Sites

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Categories: PHP Tutorials, Lately in PHP Podcast

A few months ago, the PHP Classes site completed 22 years of existence thanks to thousands of developers of the PHP community that shared their work on the site and many hundreds of thousands of other developers that benefited from contributors' work.

While the site is getting closer to celebrating its 23rd anniversary, I am publishing a series of small articles to give ten pieces of advice on becoming a better PHP developer by following modern and efficient practices.

This article is a way that I found to retribute to you that helped make the PHP Classes site a fantastic community of PHP developers.

One type of advice is about technical practices. A different kind of advice is about your quality of life as an individual that participates in society. Other advice is about good business practices.

Read this article to learn about the more exciting advice types for you.




Loaded Article

In this article you can learn:

Why It is Important to Get Good Advice

What Pieces of Advice You Can Get as a Developer

1. This article: Be a Good Community Member Sharing Your Open Source Work in Community Sites

2. Next: Use a Readable Coding Style


Contents


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Episode 90 Part 1 Video

Transcript of what was said in the podcast

Why It is Important to Get Good Advice

PHP itself was created in 1995. Many years have passed. PHP evolved a lot over time. Therefore, PHP developers also need to evolve to continue to be relevant like PHP is after all these years.

PHP evolved because core developers followed advice on how to improve PHP as a language.

Therefore following good advice is great for you as developer and for the community as a whole.

So here are several types of advice that I suggest that you follow to evolve as a PHP developer.

In the end, I invite you to collaborate and share your own advice.

What Pieces of Advice You Can Get as a Developer

1. Be a Good Community Member Sharing Your Open Source Work in Community Sites

As we all know, a developer is a person that turns a project plan into a product or a service. PHP developers have been privileged because being PHP is a language specifically thought for the Web. Our work continues to be relevant, as the Web remains relevant after over 30 years of existence.

Very few people will know about the quality of your work as a PHP developer if you do not share that work with other people to appreciate it and make good use of it.

One way to get greater exposure to your work is to publish your code on sites that host code repositories for different projects. There you can share your project code opening the source code to anybody in the world. This is what is called Open Source.

Here follows a small list of Open Source code repositories that you can use to share your code.

Github

One of the most popular Open Source code repositories is GitHub. That is a community site for developers that use many languages.

Although it is not specific to PHP, it is useful because it provides Git repository hosting. As you may know, Git is a version control system that allows keeping track of the history of changes done to a project.

Version control systems are useful because they allow you to view changes done in the past to test different versions of a project to determine what changes may have introduced bugs in your code that did not exist in older versions. So using a version control system helps you improve the quality of your code, making it easier to locate bugs so that you can fix them faster.

PHP Classes

PHP Classes is a traditional community site that allows developers to publish and advertise their PHP Open Source Projects based on classes of PHP objects. 

Authors can submit their packages to the site, regardless if they use version control systems or not. The site provides an automatic system to import existing PHP packages from GitHub repositories.

Packages published in the PHP Classes site can be downloaded as compressed archives or installed using the PHP Composer tool.

The PHP Classes site also organizes contests that give greater exposure to innovative packages and package authors that publish popular tutorial articles.

The site also tries to make publishing your code more fun by implementing several initiatives that participate in the site like a game. This is the case of the system of missions and levels that award nice badges to authors that level up and a reputation system that ranks developers according to the level of participation in the site.

Initiatives like this allowed the site to grow to near 1.6 million registered users until these days.

PEAR

PEAR is also a repository of Open Source packages based on classes of PHP objects. It was created by developers that participate in the core of developers of the PHP project itself.

Contributors need to go through a strict list of contributor rules. For instance, packages need to be approved by other more experienced developers. They need to follow a specific coding style, and there can only be one package for a specific purpose.

Packagist

Packagist is a project that is intended to simplify the installation of packages and eventually others that are also necessary to make packages work because they are dependent. Packages in Packagist can be imported from GitHub.

Developers need to use the PHP Composer tool to install packages from Packagist, just like developers can install packages from the PHP Classes site.

Frameworks

Frameworks are more complex packages that provide a complete set of features for different purposes. Practically all these frameworks are based on classes of PHP objects.

There are many popular frameworks, like Laravel, Symfony, Laminas (formerly called Zend Framework), Yii, etc.

If you develop applications that use these frameworks, you can develop your components that extend the functionality of these frameworks, thus increasing the utility of those frameworks. Sharing your framework-based components can get you a greater interest from the PHP community that uses such frameworks.

Applications

PHP Open Source applications are also based on components that can be reused in many projects.

Popular PHP applications are content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Woocommerce, Mediawiki, etc...

Some of these projects have their own code repositories. Others use Github as a base repository for all their code components.

Which Open Source Repository Community You Should Contribute

I suggest that you share your code with repositories that make sense for you. Contribute to as many repositories that you can to get more exposure to your code.

This way, you can get more feedback in the form of improvement suggestions or bug reports, so you can keep improving the quality of your code.

2. Next: Use a Readable Coding Style

Stay tuned to the next part of the Lately in PHP podcast episode 90. For now, feel free to post your comments below so we can give you attention to what you want to say about being a Good PHP Community Member.




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