I’d been thinking and talking with others along the same lines over the past six months, most recently a couple of weeks ago with Chip Dawson at the PHP meetup. There are numerous technically innovative web startups in New Zealand, but very few that manage to bridge the gap from technical solution to viable business, and far less that bridge the next gap to explosive growth.

An element of that is complacency I’m sure - the guys who’ve made it to a decent salary, have the respect of their peers, love where they live, etc and there’s no desire there to grow further. For a lot of the technically-oriented business owners however it comes down to a lack of experience of the strategic & tactical planning that’s required to execute in a way that’ll bring business success.

Those who’ve been entrepreneurial from the outset of their business lives have most likely never been exposed to the internal workings of a successful business (unless they’ve personally known a CEO or executive member of a successful team), because they’ve been working in isolation on their own ventures. That’s speaking from personal experience - I’d built and sold two internet companies (in hosting and development) before Eventfinder, and despite a business degree it’d be fair to say I had no idea of how to run a startup.

I think the answer to that is in helping the technical folks understand that “execution is everything” (I say help them understand because in that situation you don’t know just how much you don’t know). Then to facilitate them bringing on an experienced mentor/advisor/CEO who can not only help steer their business in the right direction but from whom they can learn the ropes and get the practical experience they need to be able to do it themselves.

For me that person’s been my business partner and good friend Michael Turner, a kiwi who’d been an internet strategist in Australia for over a decade before we met. Our situation was somewhat different in that it was he who approached me with the concept behind Eventfinder, but between the pair of us we were able to turn that idea into a multimillion dollar business inside of 2 years.

The message I’ve been repeating to those who’ll listen in the PHP community is that it’s absolutely worth giving up some control and equity in your fledgling tech startup to bring an experienced partner onside from whom you can learn everything you need to know about the business side of things. You’ll learn from them much, much faster than you would by making mistakes yourself, and you’ll be in a position to potentially run the ship yourself next time.

I’m also a Mac user so I logged into Zend.com, downloaded the Universal binary (all 278MB) and fired it up. First impressions were that the interface is more refined than Zend Studio’s chunky Java widget set, but there is a performance hit - at least the first time it took considerably longer to get started than the current Zend Studio 5.5 (this is on my daily workhorse, an aging but reliable PowerBook G4).

The Eclipse workspace will be familiar to previous Zend Studio users with the file explorer at top left, class explorer/outline view below it, the main panel housing the file editor and a console/debug output in a horizontal bar below that. In the editor window itself code folding is enabled by default (good) but tabs were tabs (rather than spaces) so I opened the Preferences dialog to see what I could change. There are a huge number of options but it’s simple enough to navigate through them, and tabs were converted to double spaces in no time.

The editor view has some smooth aesthetic touches and the way it displays folded code (particularly phpDoc comments) is tidier than the old Zend Studio. The auto-complete popups seem a lot smoother - definitely more fluid than they used to be. The explorers on the left have too much padding for my liking though - with a few nested subdirectories in the file browser, or a long inheritance tree in the outline view, it doesn’t take long before you have to resize the divider (and decrease the size of the edit window) to see the names of files and methods. I wonder if this could be easily fixed but couldn’t find an option to change it.

The Code Analyzer conveniently notifies you about potential bugs in your code which sounds useful, but is annoying when you can’t figure it out how to ignore them on a case-by-case basis. I ended up going back into the preferences and instructing the Analyzer to ignore two “bugs” - one-line comments ending in PHP closing tags (which I use frequently to document conditionals in XML templates) and assignments in conditionals. That change required a project rebuild - 10 minutes with the poor PowerBook’s fan on full again.

My initial impression of Neon is good, although after 4 years I think it might nearly be time for a new Mac. I’ll continue to work with the beta and see how it fares with debugging and profiling later today.

Of course, Yahoo! extended and modified Symfony to fit their needs, but what’s great is that they could actually do it, and that they will contribute their modifications back to the community in the form of plugins and bug fixes.

This is another major success for the framework following on from the earlier announcement that Yahoo! Bookmarks had been redeveloped with Symfony. Congratulations are due to Fabien, the team at Sensio and the Symfony community who have worked tirelessly to produce one of the highest quality enterprise PHP frameworks available.

For those with a recent version of WordPress and a widget-capable theme, it’s even simpler. Follow the steps below to get a sidebar like the one on the right so your visitors can see what you’re going to be up to!

1. Log in to WordPress and go to Presentation > Widgets

2. Drag the RSS 1 widget into your sidebar, and click the configure link (to the right of the RSS widget box)

3. Enter your RSS feed address:
   http://www.eventfinder.co.nz/username.rss (all your favourites) or
   http://www.eventfinder.co.nz/username/going.rss (just attending)

   

4. Enter a title (e.g. Events I’m Attending) and how many events you want shown (I chose five)

5. Close the configure window by clicking the X in the top right corner, then Save Changes

That’s it - now go back and check your blog to see the automatically updated list of your favourites in your sidebar.

The New Zealand PHP Users Group has also been growing rapidly, we’ve now got over 400 members! I moved the mailing list to Google Groups 9 months ago and I’m sure that’s helped with growth and making the list (and archives) more visible on the web. Prior to moving it had taken over 3 years to reach 238 members - I’m sure the acceleration in numbers can be attributed at least partly to growth in PHP usage too, but it’s certainly more accessible now on Google Groups.

Fast forward to today and we’ve just this morning reached 300 members on our shiny new Google Groups list server. There are well-attended (sometimes 30+) meetings in Auckland on the first Thursday of every month (thanks NatColl!) and regular meetings now being held in Wellington too. We’ve got good relationships with other related groups (NZ Web Developers in particular) and the future looks bright with new developers joining daily and initiatives such as Ben Ramsey’s PHP Groups coming on the scene.

The list has seen a few bad times (spamming, flamewars, etc) along with the good, but mostly it’s been a great new channel with opportunities for asking questions, providing knowledge and feedback, seeking work, finding PHP candidates, making contacts, and when things were slow just shooting the breeze with fellow coders. Everyone on the list should be proud of the community they’ve created - I know I am

I thought that the new exam was less obscure than the PHP4 one seemed to me at the time, and covered more ground as well. My hat goes off to Dhwani Vahia at Zend and the community team who put the questions together, they’ve done a great job.

Thanks too to Davey Shafik and Ben Ramsey for their excellent work on the study guide, although I couldn’t find the mentioned PDO section! I’d recommend the book to anyone either considering sitting the ZCE exam or just wanting to learn PHP - it covers almost all of the fundamentals in short time.

The php|architect Vulcan mock exams are good too. I did one this morning before heading out and if anything it was harder than the real exam, so they’re a good indicator of whether you’re ready or not!

In other news I’m off to Sydney on Wednesday for a week for the salsa congress. I was hoping to catch up with the local PHP community over there but just checked their website and I have to fly back to Auckland the day before they meet which is a shame. If any Sydney PHP people are reading this and want to catch up for a beer after the weekend, drop me an email.

My talk will be based around a comparison of the various options for payments processing in New Zealand, and I’ll include implementation examples and demonstrations in PHP.

The official media release is here and Reuters have more reporting here.

Hopefully this will just mean better deployment options for PHP in production, and not any less of a focus on non-Windows platforms for their other software (Studio and Guard are already slow enough on Mac).

The Google data APIs (GData) provide a protocol for reading and writing data on the web. GData can use either Atom or RSS and has a feed-publishing system built on Atom with some custom extensions for handling queries.

From the GData page at Google:

All sorts of services can provide GData feeds, from public services like blog feeds or news syndication feeds to personalized data like email or calendar events or task-list items. The RSS and Atom models are extensible, so each feed provider can define its own extensions and semantics as desired while still conforming to the standards. A feed provider can provide read-only feeds (such as a search-results feed) or read/write feeds (such as a calendar application).

The GData Client Library comes packaged with example code for reading Google Base entries, and reading and writing for Google Calendar.

I’ll play with this more over the next few days and wrap these libraries in a Symfony plugin.