⇥ Breaking into the PHP market

Bringing your products into the PHP world can be very tricky indeed.

There is so much variety in the PHP market that one can easily get lost.

At Blue Parabola, one of the services that we offer is to help companies understand the PHP market and position their products within it. It’s a tricky proposition—the world of PHP can be very strange (even to someone who has been in it for many years) and companies have to contend with a considerable amount of misinformation.

This is not to say, however, that a few simple considerations can go a long way in helping any company formulate a good PHP strategy—the specifics vary considerable from case to case, but some of the basics hold true regardless.

There is no one PHP

The first thing that a company wishing to break into the PHP market needs to understand is how to tie its technology with PHP. This is not a simple problem to solve, because the market is highly fragmented.

Some companies will want to convince you that the right way to make a technology work with PHP is to tie it with their framework. This is wrong. No framework has enough market penetration to justify making an investment in it to the exclusion of any other framework—and, in fact, there are plenty of companies that use “straight” PHP and have developed their own infrastructure. Along the same lines, a lot of developers use PHP tangentially to relying on an application-level framework, like Drupal or WordPress.

Therefore, supporting a specific framework is wasteful—as is trying to get a C extension into core (it’s just not going to happen—most core developers already think that core is too bloated) . Your best bet is to adopt a holistic approach and build your participation in the PHP ecosystem from the bottom up: start with supporting “plain” PHP and then implement connectors in as many popular PHP frameworks as you can.

There is no one community

Zend has claimed that there are 4.5 million PHP developers in the world. To me, this begs the question: where are they? Obviously, they are not at ZendCon, or php|tek, or DrupalCon, which is twice as large as both of them combined. And they are not, I am sorry to say, subscribers to our magazine, either.

Based on my personal, empirical knowledge (backed up by some educated guesses based on the factual numbers in my possession), the size of the community is probably closer to 500,000-1,000,000 users. This takes in consideration our database of users—you know, real people—and a guesstimate of how much market reach we actually have.

The fact is, however, that this number is entirely useless. What companies need to know is how many people actually matter in the community—as well, of course, as which communities matter. There are some PHP “developers” that you will never reach, no matter how much money you spend; but there are maybe 100-200 people worldwide who can, in turn, reach a disproportionately huge segment of the market: these are the people whose opinion you need to value and influence.

There is no one reach

Another significant problem is that there is no easy way to reach a significant portion of the community, either. The PHP Group has made it abundantly clear that they have no interest in community-building resources—they prefer to focus on the technical aspect of things.

Even if they did, however, there is a very large portion of the PHP community that does not, in fact, consider itself part of the PHP community at all. I am talking about users of application frameworks, like Drupal, WordPress, Joomla!, Symfony, CakePHP, and so on. While these projects could not exist without PHP, they have become powerful enough that they have generated their own critical mass of users and, by extension, their own communities that are entirely separate from the “PHP community.”

All these elements—and many more that are well beyond the scope of this post—make PHP a difficult market to understand—let alone penetrate—without a considerate look at its history, development and philosophy.

Photo credit: Reading Station Market by Tim Wilson