Davey Shafik has continued his series of posts with advice about growing a community around your product/open source libraries. In his first post he talked more about how to engage the community. In this latest post he talks about the role of "evangelists" in community relations (and why he dislikes the term).

The role of the Community Builder is to sell you on the idea of the company and the product. Not necessarily to sell you the product. Often times what we’re selling are not bought without some decision making process behind them, so a sale is not going to happen then and there anyway. Provide the education, and build the trust, and the sale will happen.

Davey then talks about why he hates the term "evangelist" and how it seems to relate more to "fanatic" than "advocate". He then gets into what he sees as the role of an advocate, including the role honesty plays and selling the customer on the right product. He then turns it around and talks about the other side of the role - advocating for the customer back to the rest of the company. Finally, he talks about two other kinds of advocacy that should also be included in the role: advocating for the community/their input and for yourself (finding a product you can be passionate about selling).

Thjis Feryn has posted another in his series of video interviews with a member of the PHP community. In this latest episode Thijs caught up with Cal Evans at this year's PHPBenelux conference.

The interview was recorded at PHPBenelux Conference 2016. Cal Evans was invited as the keynote speaker which he was very excited about. He had keynoted our very first edition back in 2010 and now he was back. Over the years there was quite some talk about inviting him back, but up until recently it never really worked out.

He obviously did a really good job.

They talk some about branding, being a "developer advocate" and being a member of the global PHP community (or just your local one). You can watch the video of the episode either in the in-page video player or directly on YouTube. If you're more audio-inclined you can also listen over on SoundCloud. If you'd like the show, you can check out other interviews on his site through the "interview" tag on his site.

On 7PHP.com today they've posted the latest in their series of PHP community interviews - this time it's a chat with Ian Barber, a developer advocate for Google+.

In this edition I talked with Ian Barber @ianbarber who is a developer advocate for Google+. Ian has been working with PHP for Virgin in the UK and has an amazing run of experience in the PHP world; delivering presentations at a number of conferences - his recent talk entails "Building a Firehose" at [PHP Tek 12 @mtacon].

In the interview Ian answers questions about:

• How he got started with PHP
• What he considers the good/bad parts of PHP
• The tools that he uses for his development
• Which user group he's a part of
• Some of the things he's learned being a part of the PHP community

You can read the rest of the interview here.

In a recent post to his blog, Lukas Smith talks about some of the recent advancements and ideas surrounding his emPHPower PHP evangelism organization (in particular a discussion at this year's International PHP Conference.

The fact of the matter is that today they [Zend] are stuck with a job they never asked to take over: They are the only PHP evangelism organization. So if you want to get some material on how to "sell" PHP to your Java loving IT department, Zend is the only real option to turn to. So we have to thank them for filling this void for now.

emPHPower is looking to replace that with a more diverse range of developers and companies that can provide details on a wide variety of PHP-related topics (including using PHP in the enterprise and the best open source solutions for different needs). He's looking to work with more of the regionally-focused PHP sites (user groups?) to help get things up and running in the beginning and then branching out to "the masses", possibly via other means.

Mike Wallner talks today about a much deliberated topic in the community currently - the inclusion of the phar extension into the core distribution of PHP and how, because of not having a good addition process, things will get a little nuts:

How many people are really reading through all mails of 100+ message threads? It's going to be a chaos. Always. Once a developer has got his new, shiny and soon-to-be-world-dominating extension into the core, he'll be a even stronger advocate of the "no-new-extensions" camp. Not to disrespect any work, but this is pure rivalism, masculine - really!

When asked it the phar extension will make it into the core, Mike usually responds with "Never" simply because of the issues surrounding the personal feelings of those that would be involved with the merge.

Mike Wallner talks today about a much deliberated topic in the community currently - the inclusion of the phar extension into the core distribution of PHP and how, because of not having a good addition process, things will get a little nuts:

How many people are really reading through all mails of 100+ message threads? It's going to be a chaos. Always. Once a developer has got his new, shiny and soon-to-be-world-dominating extension into the core, he'll be a even stronger advocate of the "no-new-extensions" camp. Not to disrespect any work, but this is pure rivalism, masculine - really!

When asked it the phar extension will make it into the core, Mike usually responds with "Never" simply because of the issues surrounding the personal feelings of those that would be involved with the merge.

Sebastian Bergmann has a quick note today on his blog about an article from IBM that taks about using unit testing, specifically PHPUnit.

IBM DeveloperWorks has an article titled "Check your PHP code at every level with unit tests" that suggests unit tests for PHP code at the module, database, and user-interface levels and proposes IBM not only uses my software, but also advocates it.

You can find out complete information on PHPUnit from the project homepage and about unit testing from here.

Sebastian Bergmann has a quick note today on his blog about an article from IBM that taks about using unit testing, specifically PHPUnit.

IBM DeveloperWorks has an article titled "Check your PHP code at every level with unit tests" that suggests unit tests for PHP code at the module, database, and user-interface levels and proposes IBM not only uses my software, but also advocates it.

You can find out complete information on PHPUnit from the project homepage and about unit testing from here.

Jacob Santos talks in this new blog post about something that, if added to PHP, just might be more trouble than it's worth - inner classes.

Inner Classes are contained in parent classes and offer a sort of namespace mechanism for the public and open private class data transfer for private subclasses.

The functionality is already available in other languages, but the question is whether it is needed in PHP. The short answer is no. With PHP execution model, it would further slow down and bloat PHP compilation.

He demonstrates their purpose with some simple examples but also gives the reasons why it would be a bad thing to try to include them, including the better choice of namespaces over inner classes.

Jacob Santos talks in this new blog post about something that, if added to PHP, just might be more trouble than it's worth - inner classes.

Inner Classes are contained in parent classes and offer a sort of namespace mechanism for the public and open private class data transfer for private subclasses.

The functionality is already available in other languages, but the question is whether it is needed in PHP. The short answer is no. With PHP execution model, it would further slow down and bloat PHP compilation.

He demonstrates their purpose with some simple examples but also gives the reasons why it would be a bad thing to try to include them, including the better choice of namespaces over inner classes.