PHP Channel’s 3rd 2015 Trimester Update
Another three months have gone by, and we’ve got some news to share.
First, let’s introduce our newest authors!
New Authors
Jeff Smith, USA
Jeff Smith is a full-stack web developer who enjoys writing and reading of all types, and is interested in the Internet, business and entrepreneurship, technology, and learning new stuff. Jeff has been a very active member of our forums for a while now, and decided to chime in with his opinions by writing about defensive programming in PHP.
His debut post was well received, and part two is coming soon. In fact, it’s already in our peer review queue, so if you’d like to take an early look and give us your opinion on it, our doors are wide open!
Jeff is a versatile author and a valuable community member, so we’re hoping we’ll see much more of his work soon.
Scott Molinari, Germany
Scott, also a very active forum member, has been supporting customers using powerful PHP applications like WordPress, vBulletin and Xenforo in his spare time for over 13 years. His company was the distributor for the German version of vBulletin for 12 of those years. The past year and a half, he’s been taking on more of the developer role and is now learning about new technologies for his new project http://skooppa.com. His goal at SitePoint is to share these new technologies with the PHP community.
Scott was so enthralled by Appserver, the PHP implementation of a stateful server, he had to take a more detailed look at it – and take a look he did. In his debut post about an in-depth look at Appserver, Scott dissects it and explains its modus operandi, priming the ground for more detailed tutorials down the line. Several of those are already on their way, so join our peer review repo to get an early look!
Christopher Pitt, New Zealand
Christopher is a writer and coder, working at SilverStripe. He usually works on application architecture, though sometimes you’ll find him building compilers or robots.
He’s a super active community member and a well known conference speaker, so we were thrilled when he agreed to write for us – especially considering the interesting topics he chose. His debut post was one about event loops in PHP – an often overlooked (and rather new) aspect of PHP that’s growing in popularity and power as the language evolves. With event loops, we’re paving the way towards async PHP and incredibly interesting projects like Icicle, which is what his second post was about. In it, Chris actually builds a standalone PHP-based server for PHP that serves an insane number of requests per second, all with maybe two dozen lines of PHP code.
Chris’ writing style and knowledge in somewhat esoteric and advanced concepts of PHP is of great interest to us and our readers, and we’re hoping to host much more of his content in the coming months.
Jad Joubran, Lebanon
At the age of 19, Jad Joubran founded eTobb, a startup that connects patients and doctors in the MENA region. At 22, his experience revolves around managing a team of 4 developers at eTobb, Technical Consulting companies in the Middle East and South Africa, publishing web development articles, presenting at international conferences and providing mentoring sessions for developers on Codementor.
We’re thrilled to have such a versatile developer on board, and after seeing him produce his Laravel + Angular Material post (which, incidentally, made the process of getting started with seemingly complicated technologies look like a piece of cake!), we’re hoping he’ll continue producing top notch content!
Welcome, guys! Hope you’re feeling at home!
Peer Review
The peer review process is still in full swing, and has now spread to other channels.
The JavaScript channel has fully embraced it and is doing really well, the WP and HTML/CSS channels are getting there, the mobile channel has the procedure tied down and we’ve also set up a peer review repo on Gitlab for all the other content like Unity, C#, C, Python, Go, etc. If you’re interested in either writing or reviewing in any of those areas, please do give us a shout after reading what it’s all about.
To recap – the peer review process was added into the mix to speed up the publication of high quality content, increase author engagement, and prevent post-publication errors by ironing posts out during draft time by means of multiple pairs of eyes. Joining as a reviewer will, among other perks, let you see the content far ahead of its publication date, keeping you truly up to date on new developments and technologies!
Most Popular Posts
The third trimester had a lot of blockbuster posts, but the ones below got the most attention:
- PHP vs NodeJS Smackdown – Right of Reply – this clickbaity piece ruffled some feathers in both camps. After a general introduction from Craig, this followup post features replies from Jim, the JS channel editor, and myself for the PHP side. Needless to say, we agreed to disagree.
- Defensive Programming in PHP – Jeff Smith’s post (see above) got a lot of attention. A decent discussion sprouted in the comments section, so be sure to check it out!
- Appserver – a Production-ready PHP-based Server by Scott (see above)
- Look, Ma! No NodeJS! – a PHP front end setup without Node – a post detailing the process of ditching Node and NPM-based tools for asset management (CSS and JS) and replacing them with the more reliable, cross-platform and versatile PHP alternatives.
- Re-introducing PDO: the Right Way to Access Databases – Parham Doustdar re-introduced PDO in this post meant to raise awareness of the
mysqlextensions outdatedness. Definitely give this a read if news about themysqlextension getting removed in PHP 7 is a surprise for you. - Build a Superfast PHP Server in Minutes with Icicle by Christopher Pitt (see above)
- Fast Multi-language Docs with SitePoint’s RTDSphinx-PHP is an introduction into a new official SitePoint open source project, a skeleton for PHP source and project documentation in Sphinx, configured for PHP syntax and fully hostable on ReadTheDocs.org with absolutely no modification needed. It’s also localization-friendly out of the box.
Quite interesting to see the most recent joinees get the most traffic! We’ll take this as a compliment of our “recruitment” tactics :)
What’s Next?
We’ve come far, but we’ve still got a ways to go! Up next, we hope to recruit many more reviewers to speed up the article processing time even more. We also have a Github bot planned to take care of some of the boring stuff for us, and we’ll be pushing out our very own MD editor soon – one designed to make writing pleasant, safe and extensible – perfect for what we need at SitePoint, and what others will surely find useful as well.
If you’d like to help us out in any degree, please don’t hesitate to get in touch! If you found bugs on SitePoint, please report them here and if you have feature requests, suggestions, complaints – anything at all – please leave them in the comments below. We promise to reply to all of them!
