I will attend Drupalcon from March 3rd to 5th in Boston, USA and will present a talk entitled Marketing Open Source Software. If you’re around, feel free to contact me.

[Updated 2008-02-21] Jeff published a list of the other accepted talks for the Marketing and Business track at Drupalcon.

[Updated 2008-02-23] I will present March 5th, 13:30-14:30 according to the (yet tentative) Drupalcon 2008 sessions schedule.

Stefan Kausch, CEO of Lieblinx approached me to help them: They are working on a fancy Web 2.0 site based on Drupal and urgently need one more Drupal developer in their team – starting yesterday. That specific job would last roughly until end of December and can be done remotely.

If you feel like becoming a hero, please write Stefan an email: s (dot) kausch (at) lieblinx (dot) net.

Stefan furthermore told me that they are also looking for Drupal/PHP devs in the long run working in their Berlin office. Hence, feel free to write to him if you are looking for a long-term engagement.

If you follow the PHP blogs, then you are likely to have read Matt “Wordpress” Mullenweg’s anti-PHP 5 rant:

PHP 5 has been, from an adoption point of view, a complete flop. Most estimates place it in the single-digit percentages or at best the low teens, mostly gassed by marginal frameworks.

He makes some good points in the post. He also manages to make himself seem like a bit of a dick

The thing that I keep wondering is if we aren’t seeing a slowdown in general PHP adoption due to other technologies being able to get a leg up while PHP 5 was in development and the succeeding slow migration from PHP 4 to 5.

Now that I work for a company creating Java-based software, I see:

• Zend on the PHP-side, who are happy to announce version 1.0 of object-oriented Zend Framework and J2EE on the Java-side already out there on the market for quite some time.
• On the Java-side, Alfresco continuously and quickly building a high-quality ECM based on Open Source Java components and on the PHP-side eZ Systems who yet do not have their flagship ECM product migrated to PHP 5.

Finally, with PHP 5, it is possible to build OO libraries able to compete with Java libraries as far as quality is concerned – but, well, those Java libraries already have a long market track-record, i.e. have been in production use for a long time.

My impression is that PHP 5 slowed down the development of PHP applications able to compete with similar Java-based server-side products. The problem being that migration from PHP 4 to PHP 5 consumes quite some developer resources for complex PHP applications. Additionally, PHP 4 keeps developers busy with finding workarounds for their applications due to limited OO features.

Did PHP applications lose market share or at least not grow as fast as their Java (or C#, etc.) counterparts due to the slow adoption of PHP 5? Unfortunately, I did not find an informative basis to answer this question sufficiently and would appreciate any hints.

I have written a little Wiki entry about how to merge the design of MediaWiki and WordPress, just as I did it on my Web site. The Wiki page explains the setup and you can also download the relevant PHP and CSS files of my design at that page. Use at your own risk.

Hurry up, submit a paper! The LinuxTag Call for Papers ends tomorrow, February 16th.

Short info about LinuxTag from the homepage:

LinuxTag 2007 opens doors from May 30 to June 2, 2007 on Berlin Expo Center under the Funkturm. We invite users and experts to learn at Europe’s leading conference and expo more about the potential of Linux, Open Source, and Free Software.

March 1st, I will start my new job at Mindquarry as VP Marketing.

Mindquarry’s Open Source product is enterprise social software, simply called “Mindquarry”. It supports spontaneous collaboration by including a Wiki, task tracker, file management, etc. The software is MPL licensed, version 1.0 will soon be available to the public. There’s an early access program available upon request.
The company was founded in 2006, it is located in Potsdam, Germany close to Berlin. The main investor is HP Ventures of SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner.

I’ll be in charge of strategic and operational marketing and community relations.

What I like most about this new job is:

• I move from an Enterprise 1.0 Open Source company (eZ Systems and its eZ Publish ECM) to an Enterprise 2.0 Open Source company (Mindquarry).
• Having 5 years of PHP programming experience, I am now looking forward towards working for a Java company. Although programming is not part of my job, I am very interested in digging deep into the code to really understand the application’s inner workings.

I actually have known one of Mindquarry’s co-founders for a few years via internet: Lars Trieloff. We only recently met in person. His expertise always impressed me.

I created a dedicated Mindquarry RSS feed for my future postings about Mindquarry, also served by the newly created Planet Mindquarry.

At this cross road of my professional life, I would like to especially thank the following persons who always supported me:

• Zak Greant
• Georg Richter
• Aleksander Farstad

Thanks guys! And of course, thanks to my wife, my biggest supporter

If you’re close, don’t miss the Vancouver PHP Conference. As far as I can tell from the schedule, many of the PHP gods will be there. February 12-13 is the date.

Bård published a short note on his blog that the call for papers for the 5th annual eZ Conference is now open. Deadline for submissions is February 1st.

The conference is worth attending not only for eZ Publish or eZ Components users and geeks, it is also interesting if you’re interested in content and knowledge management or PHP/LAMP in general. Last year, I enjoyed talking to guests such as Martin White and Anne Jubert, Rasmus Lerdorf and David Axmark – and some more of the 350 attendees.

… and thanks so much!

I have had a great time at eZ systems, both from a professional and a personal perspective: Having started as a System Developer in Nov 2004, I learned more about the technical details of eZ publish. My following roles included consulting, training, conference and customer presentations, pre-sales, etc. After 1 year at eZ and having gained a good overview of most business areas, I became part of headquarters management and ended up being the VP Communication, doing strategic governance of all global marketing and knowledge management at eZ systems.

Now it is time for me to start something new, with a different focus, where I can apply and further extend the broad skill set I was able to develop at eZ.

I just found that my article entitled PHP 5 Enterprise Edition is now available online. It has initally been published in the
International PHP Magazine.

From the introduction:

Today, J2EE could be named the de facto industry standard for the development of distributed multi-tier architecture applications. It is backed up by industry leaders like Sun, Oracle, BEA, and IBM. This article will compare PHP’s software stack with what’s available in (and for) J2EE, to overcome the typical Java versus PHP discussions that usually focus on language features, but do not take into account the overall picture. Basically, this article assembles a PHP5 Enterprise Edition (PHP5EE).

Although this article is almost 3 years old, it is still very interesting to read. Especially when reading the following sentence or projection in the article’s summary:

In no way should this article be a dispraise of all the good volunteer work that happens in the PHP community, but it definitely needs more successful companies in the PHP market who continuously climb up the ladder and extend the PHP software stack.

Considering that since the article has been published, two companies (eZ systems and Zend) have started to create their own libraries aka frameworks to extend the PHP software stack (eZ components and Zend Framework), I would say that PHP is on the right way and that my article was quite influential