Friends of the PHP Classes site

Why?

This site has been growing not only thanks to those that contributed with their software components, but also thanks to those that contributed to the promotion of the site and the value of its service: providing a space for authors to expose their work to a community that is eager to know about it.

The average rate of authors per new users is 250. This means that for every 250 new users that subscribe to the site, there is the chance of one of them to be an author that contributes to the site posting his components.

Therefore, it is important to provide means of encouragement to every member of the community that contributes by bringing more new users to the site.

Who?

This initiative is open to any member of the community. For the time being the focus is on mirror site hosts, partner sites and individual users. At a later stage the initiative will be expanded to user groups.

How?

Since the goal is to attract more subscribers and hopefully more contributing authors, this initiative will provide more recognition to those that contribute to bring more new subscribers.

Recognition is provided by exhibiting the names of users or the sites that bring more new subscribers in a special rankings to be displayed in the top charts page and also in the site content newsletter that is sent to most subscribers.

Top friends of the month chart
Top partners sites of the month chart
Top mirror sites of the week table sorted by continent and by country
To bring new subscribers and be credited for that action, users need to refer the site to potential subscribers in a special way, so it is possible to determine who referred the site to the subscribing user.

To refer the site you may just give away the URL for any page of the site. The only thing that needs to be changed is the prefix of the domain. So, instead of mentioning the URL http://www.phpclasses.org/ , mention http://referrer.type.phpclasses.org/ . referrer is the identification of who is referring. type is type of referral. If you are referring as a mirror site host, type is mirrors. If you are referring as a partner site, type is partners. If you are referring as a individual user, type is users.

For instance, if you are a user of the site with access name bigfriend, to refer the home page to another user you just need to mention the URL:

http://bigfriend.users.phpclasses.org/

If you use a URL like this to refer to some page of the site in a mailing list, more people will eventually follow the page URL and you eventually be credited for more referrals.

To simplify referrals, you may want to use a link that exists in most pages of the site named Recommend this page to a friend!. It opens on your mail program with a message ready to send that refers to the current page. If you are already logged in the site, the message exhibits the URL of the current page in a form that includes your access name ready to be identified as the referrer. All you need to do is to set the address of the recipient of the message to the address of your friends and then send the message.

Another easy form to generate automatic referrals to the site pages to be credited for you is to display the list of latest entries of the site in a page of a site of yours. Again assuming that your access name is bigfriend, all you need to do is to insert these HTML tags in your pages:

<script src="http://bigfriend.users.phpclasses.org/browse/latest/latest.js"></script>

The default look of the listing may appear well in the layout of some sites. So, there are several options that may be specified in the request URL to specify the following parameters:

bgcolor - background color
lightcolor - color of the listing rows that will appear with a lighter color
darkcolor - color of the listing rows that will appear with a darker color
titlelimit - limit number of characters that the listed titles may have. Use 0 to specify no limit.
idiom - idiom of the listing text labels.

Currently only English (en), Italian (it), Portuguese (pt) are supported. Please contact us to request the support to other idioms.

Here is an example of a customized latest entries listing assuming that your access name is coolfriend::

<script src="http://coolfriend.users.phpclasses.org/browse/latest/latest.js ?bgcolor=%23ffcc66&lightcolor=%23ffff66&darkcolor=%23cc9933&titlelimit=0&idiom=pt"></script>

(Note: this example was intentionally broken in two lines to fit this page but in practice the URL may not be broken or else the option values may be ignored)

Assuming that you have a Javascript capable browser, here is an example of how it will appear, first the default look and second the custom look:

This listing is displayed in a predefined format. If you prefer to display it in a format that is more integrated with your site, you may want to retrieve regularly the XML version of this listing in the RSS format that is available here:

http://bigfriend.users.phpclasses.org/browse/latest/latest.xml

Here you may also find components ready to parse and extract the information from data in the XML/RSS format:

http://www.phpclasses.org/rss

You may also want to display the list of the latest reviews. The HTML tag is:

<script src="http://bigfriend.users.phpclasses.org/reviews/latest/latest.js"></script>

Like with the latest entries listing, the latest reviews listing may also be customized with the same parameters in the URL. Here is an example of the HTML tag:

<script src="http://coolfriend.users.phpclasses.org/reviews/latest/latest.js ?bgcolor=%23cccccc&lightcolor=%23dddddd&darkcolor=%23bbbbbb&titlelimit=0&idiom=pt"></script>

Assuming that you have a Javascript capable browse, here is an example of how it will appear, first the default look and second the custom look:

The XML/RSS version is also available here:

http://bigfriend.users.phpclasses.org/reviews/latest/latest.xml

There is also a Mambo CMS module developed by Leonel Price. You may use that module to pick this site XML RSS feed and generate the output of a block with the latest entries listing to have it displayed in a site that uses Mambo content management software.

If you still have doubts regarding setting your referrals, feel free to contact this site support address below in this page to request further help.

Friends of the PHP Classes site