Brandon Savage has a new look at an old problem in the PHP community - the importance of a developers' understanding of marketing in applications.

Technical people seem particularly bad at marketing effectively. I think this is because we're fact-oriented, focused on the features and neat ideas our products include. We'll spend pages and pages talking about the cool things that our tool or application can do. And then we'll wonder why our client didn't buy it. Why do we do this? Because we forget that marketing isn't about features it's about meeting needs.

He points to the hierarchy of needs as an example of what really has to be considered when developing software. The further down the pyramid you and your software can go, the more effective your marketing can be. An application can do everything under the sun, but if it doesn't do what the customer wants, it'll be tossed aside.

Piggybacking on a recent proposal for traits in PHP, Lukas Smith has suggested something that could help make the organization of these sorts of contributions (and their "staying power") a bit more likely to happen - an official PHP.net wiki of sorts.

As such I really like what Stefan has done with his Traits proposal. Very nicely done. [...] Right now the RFC documents are hidden away in the unwieldy mailinglist archive and Stefan's private homepage, which could disappear any day. Of course there are also the various web archives, but what would be nice to have is a PHP.net wiki.

He notes that not only would this help protect information like this from dropping off the face of the web but it might also pave the way for some other changes to be made to the language (and to provide a space where everyone can share their ideas). He specifically mentions his wants for an array_merge_replace and a change to file_exists.