The Atlanta PHP User Group has announced their January 2013 meeting, a loo at the "Current Trends of the PHP and Open Source Job Market" (from Ari Waller):

The presentation will be an overview of the current employment market and outlook specifically for PHP developers (as well as other Open Source related Open Source trends), based on the current supply and demands in the market place, as well as career oriented topics via Q&A (Resumes, Interviews, and overall job hunting tips and strategies). Ari will cover a year by year comparison from his previous talk and discuss changes and new trends going into 2013. He will also discuss how to work with recruiters as effectively as possible (if at all), as well as questions you have always wanted to ask regarding the the inner workings of IT Staffing.

Despite it being presented by a recruitment company, they have promised an open and honest conversation about the topic, not a sales pitch. If you'd like to attend, check out this page on the Atlanta PHP site for more information - including a new meeting location.

Have a user group meeting or event you'd like announced? let us know!

On the PHPClasses.org blog today Manuel Lemos has taken a look at how big the PHP market is - how many developers there are and what kind of tools those developers might be using.

Even knowing that only a fraction of the PHP developers in the world will come to a given PHP event, the more PHP developers there are, greater is the chance to have more developers coming to the event. Therefore the first big question is: how large is the PHP developer community world wide? This is a difficult question. Zend has been publishing rough estimates of the number of PHP developers that exist in the world.

According to some estimates, there's over five million PHP developers out there. The PHPClasses site has this tool that can help show the distribution of some of these in user groups. Manuel also shares some stats he's gathered off of his site - a growing trend for visitors to use Linux and OSX as compared to Windows and the predominance for developers to use Firefox over Internet Explorer.

Other tools mentioned include FirePHP, a Javascript Debugger.

Damien Seguy has released the latest PHP statistics for last month - April 2008. Among the highlights are things like:

• PHP 5.2.5 is now the most popular PHP version, ahead of 4.4.8
• PHP 5 reaches 36.60% of PHP market share
• Still a lot of migrations toward 5.2.5 and 4.4.8

You can check out the details on these and other statistics (like PHP usage by country and version) the complete monthly stats and the evolution stats. Oh, and don't forget - Damien and crew are the ones supplying the latest edition of the elePHPants to the PHP community!

According to Tony Bibbs, PHP's real problem is itself.:

So what do I mean when I say PHP's problem is PHP itself? [...] One word. Sustainability.

He suggests that, while PHP has made a big splash in the areas it's hit, it is still tripping over its own feet. PHP, the language, can meet the needs of just about any sort of web development that might come down the line, but when good PHP developers are so hard to find, why should any organization bother with working it into their technology stack?

Comments on the article responds to the "chicken and egg situation" Tony has presented and how things like user groups can help stoke the fires of PHP's presence in not only the budding web developers but also in the professionals looking to expand their horizons.

From Dotvoid.com, there's a new posting talking about the continued use of PHP4 by developers and hosting companies and how it's effecting the community as a whole.

It is true that the PHP 5 uptake has been slow. Many internet service providers as well as many developers are reluctant to switch. This is probably, as others have stated, a circular dependency.

As ISP:s are reluctant to upgrade the popular open source projects are hesitant to upgrade. I still think the wrong people are worried. Still PHP 5 is increasing it's share and finally the day will come when version 4 will be considered legacy. Hopefully before PHP 6 is here but not necessarily.

He continues on, talking about what PHP5 is really about (it's not just the objects!) and things that can help make it an easier sell to those still lagging in a PHP4 world - like the Zend Framework.

Every developer (PHP or not) out there has sat back in their favorite chair and thought about what else is out there. Well, Cal Evans is no different and he shares a tool he was linked to (by Terry Chay) that could help you find that "what's next" in your career.

I love Nashville, TN. Well, ok, I really like it. It's a great town but I'm getting a bit restless. The problem I face is that I never know what the environment for programmers will be in a given city before moving there. So when Terry Chay briefly mentioned indeed.com's salary search tool, it sparked my interest. If I, a PHP programmer, wanted to move to another city in the US, how would I fare salary wise? Since I don't want to list every city in the US, I've selected CNN/Money's Best Places to Live in America as my list of cities to compare.

Looking specifically for PHP-related jobs, he made the query, found the cities, ranked them and listed the average salary for the area. He also grabbed the cost of living for each location based on the closest large city and matched them up.

The result?

So it's agreed then, we'll all meet in Columbia, MD.

Check out the post and the lovely graph Cal has put together for more cities and their stats.

According to this new release from the Evans Data Corporation, certain technologies are being more well used in other areas besides in North America - including PHP.

There is a greater disparity with PHP use in Emerging Markets. The largest number of developers using the language can be found in Eastern Europe (39%). India and Brazil have similar usage at a little over 31%. In contrast, only 21% of Chinese developers are utilizing PHP. In North America, 35% of developers are using PHP.

They also talk about the usage rates of a few other technologies, including Flash, Ajax, Windows, and Linux.

Cal Evans also mentions these trends in this post on the Zend Developer Zone as well as linking to the full EDC report.

Sandro Groganz has two new posts related to eZ systems today, one detailing their new strategy in the PHP market and the other, the set of slides from the eZ publish Conference this year.

In their new strategy staatement, eZ systems states why they develop the software they do, how it all relates to the eZ publish CMS, and a mention of their plans to built on top of the eZ platfom.

They look at the "mature market" that is the realm of PHP, noting it's a perfect time for them to make this move. They also talk about their development being done in "the PHP way", popular in the community. Their new focus is one driven by the community, too, adapting itself to the current climate of the market. They're also seeking to raise up the standard of their development, at the same time, raising the bar for other PHP platforms out there.

The second post just notes that the slides from the eZ publish Conference 2006 are now online. They primarily discuss the recent developments with the eZ platform and eZ application server.

According to this post on Freelancejob.com.au, the results of a statistical analysis of the job postings from getafreelancer.com show a huge surge of PHP jobs being posted.

According to statistical analysis of the 27750 freelance projects on getafreelancer.com site most wanted types of job are PHP (40% of all projects), Web Design (31%), Graphic Design (16%) and Flash (14%).

They provide both the table of the stats generated and a graph clearly showing that PHP jobs are head and shoulders above the rest.

There's an interesting new post on Christian Stocker's blog looking at what some consider to be "ruining the blog hosting market" - WordPress (as mentioned by the Swiss Blog Awards Panel).

He argues that since WordPress is such an easy install (and an easy thing to move), but you're also foregoing the benefit of having someone there to help/ask questions. He also notes, though, that a possible 90 percent of the population doesn't want to mess with installing WordPress (good for blog hosters), but of those, most probably wish they could have a more flexible solution (bad for blog hosters).