Hello and my thoughts

Good morning, I just wanted to wave a "hello" to you and try to express my thoughts about PHP evangelism. If anyone doesn't know me and/or my PHP activities, please ask. My main task in the last months/year has been pushing PHP in the E-Business in Germany (so far regarding the company names of my customers it has been successful). Some kind of unsorted, brainstormed thoughts about PHP evangelism. Mainly, as I'm German, many thoughts are in relation to Germany, the German market and the way how things sell in Germany: - The art of selling products in USA is different than in Germany. Same for USA->Israel and Israel->Germany (especially thinking of Zend who've had (or who have) difficulties selling their products in Germany). In most companies, suits are former hackers/coders. So the boy/girl who decides about buying products was formerly a PHP coder. That means: many suits are community-driven and have an affinity to technical things. - Building an evangelism site on .php.net is a very good idea. But be careful: things in Germany work in another way than in USA, Israel and the rest of the world and vice versa. USA (where Perl seems to dominate over PHP?) have other needs than Germany (where it seems that Germany is one of the biggest PHP communities in the world). It's like reading articles at clickz.com and trying to adopt the tips that were given there for Germany. - case studies are a good thing. But we from ThinkPHP had another idea about so called "PHP Motivation Studies" (which we want to publish in the near future on our web site): companies don't have to make a case study about a project they've made in PHP. Instead we're asking the company, *why* they (generally) use PHP and what decisions they've made i.e. by switching from ASP/ColdFusion/Perl to PHP and if they changed to PHP, what amount of money (if they can say that) they've saved with that. I think case studies are mainly an issue for the community. Motivation studies are IMHO better suited for the suits and IT decisioners. So far ... Björn. -- PHP-Support * realitätsnahe Performance-Messungen mit Code-Analyse Webapplikationsentwicklung * PHP-Schulungen * Consulting 0700-THINKPHP -*- bjoern@thinkphp.de