What would you consider to be ‘advanced PHP skills?’
This is strongly recommended for anyone serious about their PHP career. There are quite a few good criteria and suggestions in the comments. As well as a couple of links to the previous discussions on the subject – one and two.
About a month ago I came across an interesting question over at StackOverflow. Emanuele Minotto was asking if anybody knows of any easy way to integrate PHPDocumentor with GitHub’s wiki. It seemed like a really good idea, so I dug around, but didn’t find anything ready made. PHPDoc’s manual however suggests that things are possible. Unfortunately, I’m too busy currently to get involved in it myself, but I am really glad to see that Emanuele didn’t abandon the idea and started the project at GitHub. If that’s something that you are interested in, I strongly suggest lending a helping hand. I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d welcome this integration.
Here is an interesting easter egg in PHP. Check if your php.ini file has expose_php setting turned on like so:
; Decides whether PHP may expose the fact that it is installed ; on the server (e.g. by adding its signature to the Web ; server header). It is no security threat in any way, but it ; makes it possible to determine whether you use PHP on your ; server or not. ; http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.expose-php expose_php = On
If it’s on, then you can see PHP Credits page, which includes PHP authors and contributors, as well as authors and contributors to the PHP modules that you have installed. To see the page add the secret parameter to any of the PHP pages on your server, like so: http://localhost/index.php?=PHPB8B5F2A0-3C92-11d3-A3A9-4C7B08C10000. You’ll see a long page that starts like so:
Kudos to Chris for pointing it out to me. I’ve since disabled the setting on my server.
Economic impact of open source on small business
Here are a few of the findings we derived from Bluehost data (an EIG company) and follow-on research:
- 60% of web hosting usage is by SMBs, 71% if you include non-profits. Only 22% of hosted sites are for personal use.
- WordPress is a far more important open source product than most people give it credit for. In the SMB hosting market, it is as widely used as MySQL and PHP, far ahead of Joomla and Drupal, the other leading content management systems.
- Languages commonly used by high-tech startups, such as Ruby and Python, have little usage in the SMB hosting market, which is dominated by PHP for server-side scripting and JavaScript for client-side scripting.
- Open source hosting alternatives have at least a 2:1 cost advantage relative to proprietary solutions.
Given that SMBs are widely thought to generate as much as 50% of GDP, the productivity gains to the economy as a whole that can be attributed to open source software are significant. The most important open source programs contributing to this expansion of opportunity for small businesses include Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, JavaScript, and WordPress. The developers of these open source projects and the communities that support them are truly unsung heroes of the economy!
Via Matt Mullenweg.
