Re: Re: [metabase-dev] MDB news

Hello, On 09/16/2002 04:25 AM, Björn Schotte wrote:

if his/her work gets promoted on such a frequently visited site like phpclasses.upperdesign.com!

Because I proposed a banner exchange to be mutually beneficial. The

I don't think that a *.php.net site will ever make a banner exchange (except for the traffic sponsors). And,

Probably, some people seem to be averse to banners because that often means money to somebody. Anyway, the idea would be to exchange banners with no money involved. PEAR lacks of serious recognition among the PHP community as it was well pointed out by somebody in the comp.lang.php thread about why people do not use PEAR. Making banner exchanges with sites for PHP developers, not necessarily mine, would help.

to be honest, a banner would not fit on pear.php.net (but perhaps a text link).

Text links do not grab anybody's attention. Graphic banners can hardly make it these days, imagine how could text links (not) work.

As for PEAR, it would help getting acknowledgement that it lacks so badly. Just read the comp.lang.php thread and realize that one of the reasons pointed out by people that not use PEAR is because they do not know it.

Yep. But that's IMHO the problem of these people; if they do not look at what is in the php-4.X.Y/ directory, it's not the problem of the PEAR people.

I think you are missing the point badly. PHP and consequently PEAR would never be anything if it was not the community. If PEAR fails to attract the community of users it will also fail to attract the community of potential contributing developers. Let me make this clearer with some numbers. It takes 250 new subscribers to appear one new contributing author to the PHP classes. Since PEAR rules are more strict that rate is certainly much higher. So, PEAR needs much more promotion to get a significant number of contributions. If the promotion of PEAR does not improve, it will take many years to get to a significant level as CPAN for Perl. So, if PEAR does not get a much better promotion, the whole PHP community looses. Since PHP and PEAR are Open Source projects without a budget, doing banner exchanges with other sites is an effective solution for the problem given the constraints. Furthermore, I learned that doing banner exchanges with sites with overlapping goals is more good than bad. The truth is that no matter how much PEAR fights to become The PHP component repository, people will always look for solutions from alternative sources, even if they also use solutions from PEAR. With banner click-through rates in average as low 0.1%, there is little reason to fear loss of audience. My experience just confirms that with banner exchanges all the sites envolved win. If you go a look on the banners of partner sites of the PHP Classes site, you will notice that several of them are also sites about scripts and classes.

PEAR does not provide any of this kind of opportunities to get immediate

I know that having automatic (weekly/bi-monthly) newsletters will arouse attention to those people. Perhaps this feature

It is not just that. I recommend that you pay more attention and notice all the initiatives taken in the PHP Classes site and try to realize how many new users it grabbed and keep them coming back. All that without the benefit of being sanctioned by the PHP Group like PEAR. Basically the secret is pure and simple cooperation: give some to get some.

will come in some of the next releases of pear.php.net ? If you can't wait so long, apply for an CVS account and work on pearweb repository.

Sorry, I hardly I have time to do what need, even less to do what I do not need. Given that some people see me as an enemy of PEAR, that would not really make sense at all. The best that I can do is to share experience and insight as I am doing now despite I am spending more time to write this than I should. One thing I can assure, it takes a lot of care that I feel for the success of PHP to keep coming here after all the stabs that I get from people that hardly make any effort to try to understand that after all I am just helping especially when I make my criticisms. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos