In this new post to his blog, Stefan Koopmanschap shares some of what he thinks both the PHP language and the PHP community need right now to help make things better overall.

Today, a riot fight strong discussion happened on Twitter regarding PHP. Some guy forked PHP and made some changes to it, then released his package on his own site. Some of the improvements were clearly just to please his own taste, others were definitely useful additions. The discussion following all this was interesting. Not just the one on Twitter, but I also got a more lengthy response through e-mail. While responding to that, I thought I'd write a blogpost as well to offer my 2 cents on what I think PHP needs.

He gives a little background first, both on his involvement in the PHP project and on the event (the original post about the "PHP fork" that was released on github of PHP 5.3.2) and the PHP community's response to it. Stefan goes on to suggest a few things he things he thinks might make for a better reaction in the future like curbing the attitude problem that some community members show, the tone of negativity that shows on the internals mailing list, some of the public statements by core PHP devs and some suggestions on better project management.

He also suggests two other more community-related things to consider: having a "community manager" role that might help keep things in check and a way to help make contributions easier (too many steps in the process right now).