The PHP Programming Innovation Award goal is to provide recognition to developers who make outstanding contributions to the PHP community.
The award aims to honor developers who share components in the form of PHP classes of objects that provide innovative features or solve problems with approaches that provide additional value to the PHP applications of other developers.
The main goal of this award is to encourage developers to contribute PHP components that provide innovative features, instead of just replicating the features already provided by previously contributed components.
At the same time it is expected or hoped that the recognition and prizes, which can be earned by award nominees and winners, will motivate more capable developers, who otherwise would not participate, to make contributions.
The PHP community has grown naturally without a marketing force persuading developers to adopt it, unlike other languages that are backed by big companies with large budgets to invest in huge marketing campaigns.
This award also has an implicit goal to inspire other sites or companies to promote PHP and its community by the means of other initiatives, hopefully different from this one, that focus on motivating and providing recognition to individuals or groups who make outstanding contributions to the PHP community and foster the continuation of its growth.
Cooperating is better than competing. Cooperate and the community will embrace you.
Every month all newly published classes that were considered innovative by the PHP Classes site are nominated as candidates for the award.
In the following month, the nominees will be announced. Then, subscribers to the site may vote on which of the nominated classes they considered to be the most innovative. At the beginning of the next month, the winners will be announced as well the new nominees.
The winning author will be entitled to receive one prize provided by sponsor of choice. The remaining nominees may also be entitled to receive one prize, depending on their award rank and the availability of prizes.
Authors awarded with prizes may choose which of the prizes they would like to receive, with authors choosing in descending order of votes received. One author may only receive a prize once per month, even if more than one of his/her class qualified to win prizes.
The sponsors are responsible for delivering the prizes directly to the winning authors, except in the case when the author lives in a country to which the sponsor that provides the chosen prize may not export due to local legislation. In that case, the prize will be sent to the PHP Classes site that will ship the prize to the author later.
The current list of sponsors follows. Other sponsors may join later.
Every class submitted and approved for publishing on the PHP Classes site, automatically qualifies as a potential nominee to compete for winning the award for the month of publication.
Qualifying classes have to be submitted by their original authors. The classes do not have to be absolutely original as long as they provide innovative features compared with the other classes already published on the PHP Classes site. The classes may also have been previously published on other sites, even if those sites are code repositories similar to the PHP Classes site.
At the beginning of each month, the PHP Classes site will nominate the classes published in the previous month that were considered the most innovative. Starting then, and until the end of the month, subscribers to the site will be able to vote on one of the nominated classes. The class with the most votes will be the winner.
Authors may vote for their own classes but they may not create new accounts on the site for the purpose of increasing the number of votes for their classes. That is considered to be fraud. The site has means to detect fraud. Any attempt to commit voting fraud leads to automatic disqualification without warning.
Winners will be listed in the pages of the PHP Classes site for this award. They will also be notified by e-mail. After notification they have 7 days in which to claim their prizes. If that period passes it is assumed that the author is not interested in the prizes, and the next nominated author will be notified to select his or her prize. The PHP Classes site will not reconsider even if there were mail delivery problems that prevented a winning author receiving prize notifications messages.