Peter Gordon’s passion for building communities around open-source software development was the basis of his March 21 talk, “A PHP Primer for Technical Communicators.” (An article of Gordon’s on Vancouver-based PHP user groups appeared in the last issue of Coast Lines.)

Gordon opened his talk with statistics that showed PHP use is widespread and growing, especially in the development of content management systems for dynamic database-driven Web sites. Originally a collection of “PERL hack programs,” PHP is now a powerful pre-hypertext processing application engine. Admittedly, readers with limited programming experience might not find this as exciting as I do.

PHP is an open-source scripting language used to develop powerful Web-server–based applications. Open-source software is distributed for free use under the GNU public license and developed by teams of programmers from around the world who may never meet in person. These volunteers enjoy being part of a community that builds high-quality alternatives to high-priced commercial software.

Programming in PHP is easy to learn and practice. With an understanding of some basic concepts, anyone who knows how to use a text editor can work with databases, process calculations, manage files, and generate dynamic Web pages. A lot of the flexibility of PHP comes from it being an interpreted language: developers can see the results of their programming immediately, without having to wait for an external compiler to translate the text script into machine code.

Gordon closed with an impassioned plea for technical communicators to get involved in user groups and the open-source community. A lot of feature-rich applications would benefit from quality documentation, and technical writers would benefit from the additional exposure.

Tony Chung felt he was in over his head when he went to his first Vancouver PHP Users group meeting in 2003. Look at him now! http://www.tonychung.ca