Congrats and Thoughts on Modernizing PHPClasses

Hi Manuel, thank you for sharing your predictions and for keeping PHPClasses.org alive and evolving after 26 years. I’ve been an active author here for a long time and I really appreciate the community and all the opportunities the site has given us.

I think modernizing the site’s core and improving the user experience would be very valuable. Many of us authors see that the community now expects more direct GitHub integration, open contribution flows, and a smoother collaboration experience.

It would also be great to focus the site on what GitHub (and others) doesn’t do: strong curation, trust scores, and ways to build and verify reputation among developers. Ideas like GPG-signed certificates for package authorship could really add value and help keep the platform relevant for the next years. (blockcerts.org maybe)

I don’t have much time, but as an author I’m happy to keep contributing ideas whenever possible. Congratulations again on the 26 years. I look forward to seeing what comes next!

Hello Rafa,

Thank you for your support.

Sorry for the delay. We had an issue with the data center that kept the site server disconnected for a few days. Fortunately, we got help from another developer who helped to sort out the issue with the data center.

First, let me clarify that our internal team is small, and our budget was spent hiring a project manager to help define the priorities of the tasks we need to do to progress, as well as ship PHP elephants to those who bought them.

Also, keep in mind that the PHP Classes site is a project that I work on full-time. So we need to generate revenue to pay for our bills and keep surviving on a site that is mostly free to use for all users.

So we are working to finalize the marketplace that we have been developing since 2018 to help other developers sell products and services to other developers and split profits with our company.

Regarding GitHub, currently, we only help developers who submit packages to GitHub have more exposure for their work to the PHP Classes audience.

If I got you right, GitHub is better for handling contributions to the packages. We only publish a link to each package's GitHub page. If you have more specific ideas to improve this, just reply with the details to this message.

Signing certificates seems to be a good idea. I am updating our to-do list to add that possibility.

Regarding the curation of packages, PEAR attempted to do so and restrict packages that can be approved based on curators' opinions. However, today I do not see many people using PEAR.

What we can do is to have a score that rates packages based on quality parameters without restricting their publication. This way, authors can learn whether their packages meet the quality parameters and improve them to enhance their quality.

Your improvement ideas are very welcome. Keep sending your ideas.