New PHP Editor

Who?

September 30th marked the stepping down of Timothy Boronczyk, Phpmaster’s long time editor. He leaves behind a legacy of awesome: countless high quality articles, a fantastic and well formed writers pool, and a reputation one cannot easily catch up with.

I started out as a PHP hobbyist many years ago. After being thrown into the fire on my first real job and being forced to learn a huge and broken enterprise Zend app in two weeks, my cherry was popped. I realized PHP’s true potential for rapid application development, and branched out on my own. The following several years consisted entirely of experimentation, failures and endless StackOverflow trips. Finally, I applied to write an article for PHPMaster in July 2012. This was my first commercial article. I continued to write for SitePoint and other platforms, but always strived to deliver my best work here – on the very site that gave me so many excellent tutorials which made me who I was. More than a year later, I was asked to step in for Tim as the new PHP editor, and I couldn’t be more humbled and honored.

I am Bruno Škvorc (pronounced Sh + Quartz), a web developer from Croatia, and I’m a semi-regular author on SitePoint and other websites and a freelance developer focusing on new and potentially experimental technologies. I do quite a bit of open source development and I’m a big fan of Google+ where I get all my news from a relatively narrow high quality circle of hand picked industry leaders and clever people. You can learn more about me via the links on my author page.

What’s next?

So what’s next under my “regime”? First and foremost, we’ll need to re-brand. Phpmaster effectively no longer exists. While the moniker will most likely remain among us writers due to nostalgia and the fact that it’s shorter to say and write than “SitePoint PHP”, the channel really is, effectively, SitePoint’s PHP channel and should be addressed as such.

Quality wise, the channel will only improve. Not that quality was lacking before, but I intend to do my best to bring it up another notch. We’ll be focusing on specific problems, concrete examples, and production worthy code. We’ll be producing fewer and fewer articles that end with “this code should not be used in production” and more and more articles that end with “this code is safe enough to be used in production – in fact, it’s safer than most of what you can find out there”. We fully intend to give other sites a run for their money.

How you can contribute to SitePoint’s PHP channel

To make the PHP channel even better, we need your help. If you’d like to contribute (and maybe even get paid for doing so), we’d love to have you on board.

Writing

If you feel confident about a topic, or would like to research a technology you’re unfamiliar with and get paid for it, please, get in touch. If your English is at a near-native or higher level and you love PHP, definitely get in touch. If you’re just starting out and would like to share the pitfalls and plights with the public – you guessed it – get in touch. There’s a lot of inspiration around us, and a plethora of topics up for grabs. Ping me on Google+ or via email and we’ll have a chat.

There are no prerequisites – you can have a PhD in PHP or you can be a total newbie, writing for us will – and I guarantee this – help you become everything you want to be (as long as everything you want to be is a PHP professional ;) ).

Suggesting topics

Are you curious about something? Did you develop something and would like someone else to review it, maybe even give out some licenses to readers if the software is commercial? Did you hear about a technology but lack the expertise to test it and determine if it’s the right thing for you? Anything goes – if you have an idea for a PHP related article you’d absolutely love to read, let me know.

Social aspect – spread the word

Finally, if you’re just an eager reader, help out by spreading the word. SitePoint’s PHP channel will from now on have a very active Google+ counterpart through the SitePoint PHP Google+ page. Join us on Google+, add the page to your circles and reshare the news we’ll be posting. I’ll personally make sure I write an elaborate post announcement every time we publish a new article. The channel is nothing without its fantastic readers, and we want to actively acknowledge this.

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Excuse the conclusion pun, it was too hard to resist. Please join me in once again extending my gratitude to Tim who left me with a truly high quality foundation. SitePoint’s PHP Channel (SPC?) won’t be the same without him, but we’ll do our best to maintain and overcome the standards he set. Welcome to the new era of “Phpmaster”!