Successful PHP Applications: Making Informed Decisions

Business logic translates to PHP best-practices: Introduction
The most important questions clients can ask about PHP development are the ones that apply to their core business processes. Over my seven year career as a PHP developer I’ve been relied upon to provide fresh, valid advice when it comes to interpreting them. The most important factor in relaying the right information to clients is a proper analysis of their business objectives. To do this is, you must think from the client’s perspective and accurately transform their concept into a best-practice PHP development effort. This article is the first in a series designed to examine what I think are the best ways to breakdown business facts and thereby determine cost-effective course of action when writing applications in PHP. Reliable, efficient, and niche satisfying software is what follows.

What software-sex is your client? ... Probably Transgendered!
The nature of software development online indiscriminately follows trends in supply and demand. i.e.- Someone gets a good idea, it succeeds, thousands of clones appear. After competition rises, the original creator of the idea will move to add more valuable services or products for a cheaper price. Everyone else adjusts, and on, and on …into infinitude.

This happens especially in an open-source market; the bottom line of what you pay for is always customization. Business objectives are like an attractive woman: If solutions were clothes, then a form-fitting one would look best on her. Of course, clothes can sometimes be expensive when they’re custom tailored. That’s why the first and most obvious thing you can do is show the available styles of clothes.

Now I know what you’re thinking, that if I had to sit here and try on clothes with clients nine hours a day I’d be driven to insanity with the quickness. You’re right, there is one preliminary step: Determining what gender of software our client wants to be in the bedroom with.

You see there are two distinct sexes that I like to group online software development efforts into:

Client – Custom software, written from the ground up by one or more developers to suit the needs of a specific project/ client.
Resale – Software designed for sale or free distribution to a large audience, commonly with a large development effort.

I’m going to tell you straight-off: You can’t develop custom software to the level of aesthetic professionalism and usability that a product like basecamp or wordpress has attained in a week and for less than a few grand. It just doesn’t happen. Those are some of the finest PHP applications publicly available, the hottest open source resales on the market.

Here comes a dirty analogy: It is not uncommon for clients to use software combinations that are somewhere in the middle, if you know what I mean. I like to call them transgendered software implementations because they are often awkwardly implemented and rough around the edges. (I just chortled a bit) Despite every sage amount of advice I can offer, organically grown solutions are inherent to the nature of the web, and cheap. Despite how ugly and unnatural they are, they have to fit into the market.

Envisioning course of action
The imagery I’m setting off in your head must be incredibly wacky, but what I’m really explaining here is that there are just a broad spectrum of in-between solutions available on the web. Client software is obviously the most expensive and time-consuming because you must need a solid strategy and development time to make custom solutions matched to client needs. Resale software is often the cheapest solution because it is open-source or managed. For instance, Foundco offers a managed hosting service where client applications are upgraded and maintained automatically across the board, thereby reducing development and maintenance costs.

Deciphering Cost/Effect
There are plenty of options to go around, but what I’m trying to procure for you in these articles is certainty. The only way to do that is to start getting specfic in terms of content and objectives. Over the next few articles that’s exactly what I’ll be doing, getting gritty. I’ve invented a set of rules for helping ascertain the best course of action for clients based on their business objectives. Because there is one thing for certain: No resale solution will serve all of your feature needs, and not every custom client solution will fit your budget. Helping you make informed decisions on what fits best is why we’re here.

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