On the PHPClasses.org blog there's a new post with a "zeitgeist" they've generated from statistics on the site (such as search queries and overall popularity of packages).

For those that are not yet aware of this probably because they only arrived to the PHPClasses site recently, PHP Zeitgeist is an initiative that aims to study what were the last year trends regarding what PHP developers have been searching for.

According to their results, some of the trends ramping up (or still going strong) for 2012 include:

• Social media sites
• Sites like Groupon, Foursquare and Bitcoin
• jQuery plugins
• Doctrine
• MODX
• SugarCRM

On the PHPClasses.org blog there's a new post sharing their own PHP Zeitgeist of the terms that were of most interest to their visitors in 2010.

Since last year, the PHPClasses site started publishing trends about what PHP developers have been looking for in this site. This is an initiative that is repeated every year. It is similar to Google Zeitgeist, except that instead of analyzing Google user searches, it analyzes searches done by PHP developers on this site.

A lot of the results aren't surprising given the current state of things on the web - terms like "andriod", "mongodb", "html5" and "facebook" all make appearances. Manuel looks at a few of the tops results and gets a bit more specific on each, citing a few reasons why visitors might have been searching.

On the PHPClasses.org blog there's a new post talking about a zeitgeist he's created (Manuel Lemos) based on the searching and demand from the PHPClasses.org site.

PHP Zeitgeist is an initiative somewhat similar to Google Zeitgeist. The main difference is that it is based on the statistics of searches performed by PHP developers on the PHPClasses site. Maybe it would be more accurate to call it PHPClasses Zeitgeist, as only part of the PHP community uses the PHPClasses site to search what they need.

Their zeitgeist is split up by keyword and year to show the top searched terms for that time. He lists out some of the top search topics of the past few years (from 2001 through 2009) with the direct links to the results for each.