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We’re off by two but still happy to bring you an update from the foundation.

It's been a month since the PHP Foundation began to fully deliver on its 2022 goal of hiring developers to work on the PHP core.

Backed by our awesome sponsors, six talented folks have already been doing their work for a whole month. Derick Rethans, Arnaud Le Blanc, George Peter Banyard, Jakub Zelenka, and Máté Kocsis started on April 1, and Ilija Tovilo started even earlier than that. 

We’ve made the first payouts, and we will continue making them regularly at the end of each month.

We received about 70 applications in total. From them, we selected everyone who had significant experience making php-src contributions.

We also now have a pool of a few other candidates, and we will consider involving them later.

All of the current developers are working part time, and everyone has different working hours. The developers devote 10–40% of their time exclusively to PHP core maintenance, bug fixes, code reviews, preparing proposals, and implementing new language features.

You can follow the Foundation team's work in real-time by looking at commits in php/php-src and discussions in the Internals mailing list.

In addition to the PHP Foundation team, even more work on the PHP core is being done by Dmitry Stogov, Christoph M. Becker, and many other contributors to core and documentation. We’d like to give a big shout-out and thank-you to them!

We have started a separate PHP Roundup newsletter that covers the development of the PHP core in more detail. Ayesh Karunaratne, the author of the PHP.Watch website, is leading this initiative.

Check it out and subscribe at thephp.foundation/blog/2022/04/28/php-roundup-1/.

Some folks have asked us whether there is a roadmap for PHP. The short answer is ‘No’. But we’d be happy to grow to the point where we can have one.

The problem the Foundation was created to address will not be solved overnight simply because the funds become available. While PHP is in a better position than it has ever been in terms of financing, this doesn't do much to improve the bus factor. In other words, financing alone is not able to increase the availability of the expertise needed to execute the kinds of projects that would appear on a roadmap.

Financing allows us to cultivate expertise organically, which results in increasing the bus factor. That is precisely what we are currently doing. The only way to become an expert in PHP is by doing PHP. We are essentially paying contributors to become the kind of experts we will need in the future while at the same time compensating them for their valuable contributions in the present.

It has taken us six months to get this far. And there'll be a time, quite soon, when we can talk more extensively about the future.

Thanks to the work of Matthew Weier O'Phinney, the foundation’s official website is now up and running. On its blog, you can find all the updates and the PHP Roundup series.

The site is open source and is hosted on GitHub at github.com/ThePHPF/thephp.foundation. 

It is made with the Sculpin static generator and uses Tailwind CSS. There are some known issues, and pull requests with fixes and improvements are welcome.

We will add pages about the foundation's structure and team shortly.

We’d like to give a shout-out to everyone for your continued support, we truly appreciate it – the PHP Foundation is all of us!

That’s all for today. Follow us on Twitter @ThePHPF to get the latest updates from the Foundation.

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