(A) PHP App User: Uses applications written in PHP and has no direct exposure to the code
(B) PHP App Developer: Maintains and develop with plain PHP or apps/frameworks
(C) PHP App Engineer: Frameworks/CMS/applications in general
(D) PHP Core Engineer: PHP 5/6

Group (A) > (B) > (C) > (D). There would be some people who are in all 4 groups, but I say the 4.5 million is right if you consider PHP App Users (A). As Marco pointed out, most people who fall under the (A) category might not even know that the app they are using was written in PHP (i.e. Drupal admins/artists/managers/content providers). Why should they care? It works and they don’t have to maintain it, but, they are the ones who will pay you to use your app. All you have to do is Maintain, support & improve the app with your Engineers who rely on the Core Engineers that make the whole thing possible in the first place.

Groups (B), (C) and (D) seek IT knowledge and some will even pay for it by going to a conference, subscribing to a magazine or buying a book. Now, knowledge is a tricky thing to sell and some might even argue that it should be free. There’s a very fine line there. There’s also the problem of the very short expiry date of any kind of knowledge in the IT world. For example, the average shelf-life of an IT book is 6 months! Knowledge on Technology is hard to sell. Your audience is small, gets bored easily and is always hungry so you better keep their attention with lots of interesting knowledge and show them sharks with laser beams mounted on their heads. Ok, maybe not laser beams, but you get the idea.

So, pick the group you want to sell to wisely young grasshopper. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and calibrate some pulse rifles.

- A

This is a good post. As I sit here at ZendCon and think back over what I’ve seen this week, one of your points strikes a chord with me. I do appreciate Zend, Microsoft and IBM coming together to create the new simple cloud API. (the url escapes me at the moment…forgive me, it’s early) I would however, like to have seen more of the PHP community involved in this project. As you stated, no one framework has enough penetration to make it THE framework so I would have liked to see Zend reach out to the other two major frameworks and invite their participation in the project.

It would have been nice if Microsoft, who seems to have a clue these days, stepped up and insisted that there be more than just Zend Framework represented before they would get involved. This would both help the project enjoy wider acceptance and it would help cement their role as a thought leader in the PHP community and not just the community bartender. (Not that I’m complaining about their role as community bartender)

Beyond that, I think your estimate of PHP developers is much more accurate than the 4.5 million number. In their defense, Zend did not use the PIDOMA methodology to arrive at that number, they got it from the Evans Data Corp (No relation) who published it this past spring.

Thanks for the thought provoking post.

=C=