It’s hard to believe that it’s already been a month since the first issue of Web & PHP Magazine. We debuted on the last Friday of March and, despite a few technical hiccups, got a great response from the community. Thanks to some handy re-tweets and a link from the venerable Chris Cornutt over at PHPDeveloper.org, we’ve racked up over 1,000 free downloads. Given the great content in this second issue, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be just as popular.
- INTERVIEW Colin Hayhurst, co-founder of StackBlaze, on running a PHP startup
- EVENT A preview of PHP Summit 2012 UK
- ARCHITECTURE Stefan Priebsch (thePHP.cc) on how to see the bigger picture
- ‘PaaS: the cloud on-ramp for PHP developers’ by Lucas Carlson (AppFog)
- ‘Cryptography in PHP’ by Enrico Zimuel (Zend)
As ever, if you’ve got something that you’d like to see us cover, or an article of your own that you’d like to submit, feel free to get in touch, either on Twitter (@webandphp) or via email (louisg@sandsmedia.com). While we find ourselves stumbling into themes now and then (databases last issue, PaaS today), we like to keep things as open and wide-ranging as possible, and we’re hoping to introduce more community-focused columns and features over the next few months. As Zoë Slattery emphasised in our first issue, one of PHP’s greatest assets is the network of enthusiastic people across the globe who use it every day.
An infamous hatchet job currently doing the rounds describes the PHP ecosystem as a “community of amateurs”, claiming that “[v]ery few people designing it, working on it, or writing code in it seem to know what they’re doing.” For what it’s worth, we couldn’t agree less. PHP certainly has its newbies and its hobbyists, just like any other project, but it also boasts one of the most committed core development teams we’ve ever seen, a group of individuals volunteering their own time to constantly update and improve the language. When you throw in an active community of third-party developers and some of the most high-profile corporate users out there, you get a pretty potent cocktail of experience, skill and, most importantly, enthusiasm.
— Louis Goddard, Editor (louisg@sandsmedia.com)