On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 12:35 AM Lynn <kja...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 10:58 PM Peter Bowyer <phpmailingli...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > > > One can argue that WordPress, with it powering 34% of the web (source: > > wordpress.org) represents more than 50% of PHP users, and therefore > > aligning the language to how they use it would be sensible, as they are > the > > majority of users. PHP and WordPress have had a symbiotic relationship, > the > > success of one increasing the success of the other. > > > > How many of those are actually developers? Because the way I understand > this numbers, "powering the web", that doesn't mean 34% are also > developers. It wouldn't surprise me if a big portion of these applications > could've also be a system written in another language, deployed, plugins > installed, added some themes and done, no PHP knowledge required. >
Many are. The WP developer ecosystem footprint is at the same order of magnitude as (and in some geographics larger than) that of 'generic' PHP - in terms of conferences and conference sizes, usergroups, available jobs, etc. I don't think any of us can pull numbers off of our sleeves - but the vast majority of folks who deploy WordPress sites that I bumped into also deal with at least some custom PHP code - and are responsible for the deployment whether they wrote it or not. It's true that there are many agencies and freelancers that do a lot more than one site. But it's also true that the WordPress numbers are enormous even if we cut them down by a factor of 10 (which I believe would be big exaggeration) And of course, the can be said about PHP apps in general - many developers produce a lot more than just one site. So while there's no 1:1 correlation between the number of sites and the number of developers, it's true for both WP and generic PHP (perhaps in slightly different scales). And of course #2 - we're not only talking about WordPress - non-WP developers will be affected by this as well. Zeev
