PHP Classes

PHP Zeitgeist 2011

Recommend this page to a friend!
  Blog PHP Classes blog   RSS 1.0 feed RSS 2.0 feed   Blog PHP Zeitgeist 2011   Post a comment Post a comment   See comments See comments (6)   Trackbacks (0)  

Author:

Viewers: 7

Last month viewers: 1

Categories: New site features, PHP community, PHP opinions, Gamification, PHP Zeitgeist

The PHP Zeitgeist is an initiative that allows us to understand what were some of the main new trends and concerns of the PHP developers in the past year.

Read this article to learn about what new things PHP developers have been searching more in 2011 and what are their needs that probably still need to be fulfilled.




Loaded Article

Contents

What is the PHP Zeitgeist?

What is new in PHP Zeitgeist 2011?

What are the most relevant trends of PHP in 2011?

Suggestions for New Classes to be Submitted

Conclusion

What is the PHP Zeitgeist?

PHP Zeitgeist based on work licensed under  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E3%82%B6%E3%82%A4%E3%83%88%E3%82%AC%E3%82%A4%E3%82%B9%E3%83%88%E9%81%8B%E5%8B%95%E3%83%AD%E3%82%B4.pngFor 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.

Zeitgeist is a German expression that means the spirit of the time. The PHP Zeitgeist initiative started in 2010. It is very similar Google Zeitgeist but it is based on statistics from the searches done by the users of the PHPClasses site.

What is new in PHP Zeitgeist 2011?

The PHP Zeitgeist 2011 edition is already available since a few days ago. It is usually is made available in the first days of the year, but this year it was delayed a bit to incorporate a few changes that were done to make it more useful.

One of the changes made to the algorithm was to find trending search keywords that previously would have gone unnoticed. Currently the top 3000 most searched keywords are considered, as opposed to 2000 used in the past.

Now, only the top new 100 of those 3000 search keywords are considered trending if they never were trending in the previous years. This will allow to highlight searches that may have made into the top 3000 most searched keywords but did not get to the 100 top new keywords.

This year the algorithm also excluded any names of contributors of the PHP Classes site that may appear in the top searches. Although it may be interesting for those contributors to know if their names are being searched in the PHP Classes site, that is not relevant for the PHP community as a whole because great part of the PHP developers do not come to the PHP Classes site.

Another point is that searches done by anonymous users that do not return any results are now also being considered, unlike in the past. This is helpful to discover latent needs for things that are not yet available, at least in the PHPClasses site. This required more efficient filter rules to discard spam searches.

What are the most relevant trends of PHP in 2011?

With all these algorithm changes mentioned above, the top trending searches of the past years had to be computed again, but only the year 2011 is being commented on this analysis.

Looking at the top trending searches of 2011, we can see a consolidation of the interest for components of APIs of popular social media sites like Facebook (facebook like, facebook wall, facebook application, facebook post, facebook share) as well Twitter (twitter login, twitter class, twitter connect), although Facebook itself started trending in 2007 and Twitter in 2009.

Other popular sites like Groupon, Foursquare, Wunderground, Google Webmaster Tools, Bitcoin also started trending more intensively. This certainly reveals a more significant interest of PHP developers for using those sites APIs, despite those sites already exist since a longer time.

Other miscelaneous interests worth noticing relate to libraries and applications that seem to be gaining more interest in the PHP world like jQuery grid, Doctrine, Modx, SugarCRM and Minecraft.

Suggestions for New Classes to be Submitted

One of the most interesting uses of the PHP Zeitgeist, especially for developers that contribute to the PHPClasses site, is to determine which types of classes may be having greater demand.

Submitting new classes related with topics with great demand may result in greater feedback and recognition for the developers that contribute such classes.

Furthermore, if a developer submits a new class for a purpose with great demand for which currently there are no classes in the site to fulfill that need, chances are that such developer may be at least nominated to the PHP Programming Innovation Award with great chances of getting more feedback, recognition and prizes that are given to the nominees by the award sponsors.

So if you are interested in taking this opportunity and submit innovative that may get you plenty of benefits, here follows a list of a few trending searches that for now there are no components for the related purposes.

Conclusion

As always this edition of the PHP Zeitgeist was insightful. It allows us to understand better what are the current concerns of the PHP developers from the types of things that they have been searching for last year.

Next year there will be another edition of the PHP Zeitgeist initiative. I am not going to try guessing what will be the new 2012 trends among PHP developers, but if you have any ideas about those trends or have any other comments about this article, feel free to post a comment with your thoughts.




You need to be a registered user or login to post a comment

Login Immediately with your account on:



Comments:

3. Bioinformatics solutions - hector valverde (2012-01-22 03:02)
Classes for bioinformatics programming, like Bioperl... - 1 reply
Read the whole comment and replies

1. about your algorithm - Alan Marcel (2012-01-19 09:55)
algorithm... - 1 reply
Read the whole comment and replies

2. Nice ! - Olivier Bourdoux (2012-01-19 09:54)
Is Minecraft the game ?... - 1 reply
Read the whole comment and replies



  Blog PHP Classes blog   RSS 1.0 feed RSS 2.0 feed   Blog PHP Zeitgeist 2011   Post a comment Post a comment   See comments See comments (6)   Trackbacks (0)