The How and the Why of this group as I remember it.

First let me say that nothing in this message is meant as speaking for the group. I am posting my recollections from the meeting as well as my impressions and opinions. I was not elected to speak for the group and I am not pretending to. Here's the story as I remember it. Why a standards group? ================== This group was not my idea and it's only by a quirk of fate that I was even at the meeting. As far as I can tell, the group was formed when representatives of several of the major PHP projects got together and decided that if they can find areas of cooperation within their own spheres of influence, it would be a win for all of them, and the PHP community at large. To paraphrase the goal of this group, we are saying "Hey, we are all agreeing that we are going to code this way and we'd like you to do it to." Who was there ============ Agavi - David Zülke Cake - Nate Abele PEAR - Brett Bieber, David Coallier, Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson, Travis Swicegood, Phing - Travis Swicegood Solar - Paul Jones Symfony - Stefan Koopmanschap Zend Framework - Matthew Weier O'Phinney At-large community member - Cal Evans. For the most part, Travis drove the meeting and did an excellent job but each person at the meeting contributed in a meaningful way. How is this group structured ===================== As far as I can recall, there were only 3 rules set in place governing the group. 1) It was a closed group 2) New members had to be approved by the group 3) Each represented project is allowed one and only one vote. Regardless of how many members of the group represent a specific project, the project only gets one vote. For the record, during the first meeting I did not have a vote but simply participated in the discussions. I was officially voted in at the end of the meeting making me the first non-founder of the group to be voted into the group and the (so far) only at-large community member. That's it. You have to love the simplicity We don't have a hierarchy, we don't have an elected board, or even regularly scheduled meetings. We have an agenda and that's it.Everything this group discusses or does should be measured against that single agenda of "common coding standards". If you want to get involved, petition for membership. I'll have to warn you though that I think all of us are in agreement that too many cooks spoil the broth. I hope that the wisdom of the first meeting prevails and the bar for membership is set high. Just disagreeing with the standards we set isn't enough to warrant membership. (again, IMO) This Mailing List ============ At some point near the end of the meeting, after we agreed on 3 standards in 2 hours, we thought that maybe it would be a good idea to continue talking. We decided to setup a mailing list. In the interest of transparency, we decided to allow others to view the list so that no one could say they didn't understand why a decision was made. It's only through a technical quirk that this mailing list was open for comment by non-voting members. We want people to understand what we are doing and why but we didn't want to create another internals where any small detail is discussed for years before someone commits a patch. This is not an ivory tower but if the list is open for public comment then it's not a working group, it's a mailing list reading group. At some point soon, I hope the mailing list will be put in moderated mode and that everyone will be free to watch and openly use their blogs and mailing lists to discuss what is going on. My Conclusion =========== I will say that I am proud to be a mamber of this group. Every person at the meeting pulled together to help make the 3 standards possible. Each standard voted on had at least one project that is going to have to change they way they do things to implement it. I think it shows that the PHP community as a whole is maturing that these projects can recognizes the benefit of common standards over their own personal style preferences. This group is not setting itself above all others saying we know best. We are trying to find common ground between a lot of projects so that PHP developers world-wide can move between the code in those projects and not have to re-learn standards each time. I for one would love to see what comes out of this group be adopted by the PHP community as "best practices" in coding and will do every thing I can to promote the standards this group agrees upon. There will be people who disagree and wants to do it another way. I'm ok with that and I hope the members of this group are too. (The great thing about standards is there are so many from which to choose.) At the end of the day, it's up to the leaders of the project or the manager of the corporate team to select the coding standards that work best for their team. Thanks for taking the time to read this and to the members of the group, in case I didn't say it at the meeting, thanks for taking your personal time to help make PHP a better place to code. Sincerely, =C=