PHP School has been chosen as one of the open source projects to be available to hack on at the Hackathon on Friday evening of PHPNW 2016. We thought it would be a good idea to lay some ideas/aims down here so we can easily link to it and hackathon attendees can jump right in.

Translatable workshops

When we first released PHP School, in particular, the workshop Learn You PHP we were asked whether the exercises could be translated. This would be a pretty big job but would take PHP School to the next level in terms of exposure and outreach.

We have created a milestone here which contains some issues and steps to incorporate translations.

Check out the repository for Learn You PHP to see how exercises are organised, the bulk of the code for this will need adding in the workshop framework, php-workshop.

More workshops

The more workshops PHP School has, the more useful it is. With that in mind we decided it would be a good idea to focus on building more. One we wanted to build for a while is an absolute basics for PHP, basics to the point we are explaining variables and loops. The inspiration here was friends enquiring about PHP School but not knowing anything about programming and it was always a goal to reach for the absolute beginners. NodeSchool also have a similar one for JavaScript so we thought we could base it on that: https://www.github.com/sethvincent/javascripting.

We created a repo and started a couple of exercises here: https://github.com/php-school/the-basics.

We imagine the process at the hackathon to go something like:

  • Discuss topics that should be included in the workshop around programming/PHP basics
  • Come up with a list of exercises and exercises name with an aim for each (eg teach how variables work)
  • Each person or group of people pick an exercise and tackle it!
  • Once in a working state you can send a PR and we can all review

Something else

If none of the above tickles your fancy you can try building your own workshop or adding some other feature you think is missing. Maybe the basic stuff doesn't sound so interesting to you and you want to build a more advanced workshop, maybe around PHP7, Composer, Iterators, Functional Programming, Recursive functions and so on. If that sounds interesting to you, start your own workshop by following the instructions at our docs.

See you there!