Good day and good will to this group

Just came across the existence of this group via Twitter and some blogs. As someone that has been writing PHP applications for 13 years, I want to keep an eye on it. I run open source projects that will openly welcome patches and new development from other developers. I also have to hire fresh, young PHP talent. I need to know what they are being told/fed. 1. If you "live" on php.net, you are not, despite how much you say you are, simply a group of people that want to work together, outsiders be damned. New, naive users will see you as THE PHP STANDARDS GROUP. The choice is to embrace that title or move away from php.net and become irrelevant to the community. 2. Try and make sure this is discussion about PHP standards and not PHP OOP standards. There are millions of developers that don't live, eat, breath and crap OOP in PHP. Its roots are not in OOP. A great C developer can pick up PHP very quickly and make awesome things with it and never use OOP. I know, let that sink in for a second. It's true. auto_loading is cool, but its performance benefits are largly negated by opcode caches. That just makes it magic. Some people like magic. I am one that does not. I would like to see this extend into concepts such as separation of data gathering and presentation. And that does not mean MVC as much as it is a concept that many people just don't consider. It can be done in one file. You don't need 5 classes to output a list of names. But, it does not have to be spaghetti code either. In the end, people will decide if they want to follow the standard or not. At both dealnews.com and Phorum we have our own coding standards. In both cases we started with the PEAR standard and changed what we did not like. FWIW, I use none of the projects mentioned in the list of the "Who's Who" of the PHP world who hold "millions" of PHP developers fates in their hands. I use a little PEAR when it suits my needs. The group is focused on frameworks and libraries and have made no mention about the applications like Joomla, Drupal, phpMyAdmin and others that are MUCH more widely used than any one of the frameworks mentioned here. Does their opinion not count or are was it just that they were not at the one PHP related conference that everyone else was? And are you saying that if the lead developer of Joomla happened upon this list his opinion would not be welcome? What about someone like me that has been doing this longer than some of you likely have been driving a car? I think that is short sited. I also believe that there are a few people on the list proclaiming that SOMEONE has to make a decision at some point and we can't listen to everyone. I don't see the list supporting that idea though. My guess is most people don't feel that way. But, as a long term member of internals, I can tell you that the perception is that silence equals agreement when the more boisterous people start talking. I really do want to see this work. I would love a good standard that is widespread. Then when I hire someone, he/she codes like I want him/her too and I don't have to spend the next year molding him/her. Brian. -------- http://brian.moonspot.net/