PHP User Group Meeting in Mexico City Celebrating the PHP Classes Site's 27th Birthday and Planned New Features

In this article, you will learn about:

1. Mexico City PHP User Group Restart Meeting

2. PHP Classes Site 27th BirthDay

3. PHP Classes Marketplace to Help Developers to Sell More Products and Services

4. New Project to Teach How to Become a Successful Business Owner

1. Mexico City PHP User Group Restart Meeting

1.1. Why PHP User Groups Are a Good Idea

User groups are always a good idea for developers to join and learn more from each other.

Often user groups have regular meetings that happen in the regions where the developers are located.

User groups usually last when there is collaboration between the members to split the work of organizing all the steps to make user group meetings happen. This is not an easy task because most developers have spouses, family, and jobs to give priority.

User groups last while collaboration happens. So it is normal that the user groups that survive happen in larger cities and the developers are willing to do the necessary work to have regular meetings.

1.2. What is the PHP CDMX User Group

Recently I was contacted by Roberto Garcia of Mexico City. He wants to restart the PHP user group of Mexico City.

On the PHP Classes site we have a section to promote PHP user groups. We still need to do some work to maintain this section of the site to keep up with changes that happened over time on the Internet resources, like Google Maps integration and the way user groups appear on their sites. Still, this site section is working.

Anyway, to help Roberto on the challenge to restart a PHP user group in Mexico City, I will be participating in the initial meeting.

1.3. When and Where the PHP CDMX User Group Initial Meeting Will Happen

This meeting will happen on Saturday, July 18 in Mexico City around 12:00 local time. We are going to meet first at the Presidente Intercontinental Mexico City Hotel and then we move to coffee shop nearby.

Coincidentally, I will be attending to a Google event for being a Google product expert since 2009. I do volunteer support work to help users of some Google product solve their problems with those products.

So I will use some spare time to attend to the PHP CDMX user group meeting.

1.4. What We Will Talk About the PHP CDMX User Group Meeting Will Happen

For now there will be two talks in this meeting:

Manuel Lemos in English about: How Find and Validate SAAS Ideas to Make Money.

This is a short talk about to turn a software as a service into a viable business for those developers that want to evolve and become business owners.

Robert Garcia in Spanish IA generativa en PHP: Integrando LLMs en aplicaciones del mundo real

Esta es una charla breve sobre cómo crear un sistema mínimo RAG (Generación Aumentada por Recuperación) construido con PHP 8, manteniéndolo lo más básico posible para explicar los conceptos clave y mostrarle a la audiencia cómo programarlo en vivo.

We will also talk with other developers that show in this event. So everybody will have the opportunity to say something useful to other developers.

1.5. How Can Developers Signup to Participate in the PHP CDMX User Group Meeting

You can signup to participate in the meeting by going to the registration page, so you can contact Roberto Garcia that is organizing the event.

Roberto will help you to reach the meeting place and clear any other doubts that you may have.

2. PHP Classes Site 27th BirthDay

The PHP Classes site completed 27 years of existence on June 24, 2026.

This year completes a 7 year cycle of evolution. We do research to learn what users want today and it is different from what the users wanted in the past.

It is always a big challenge to take advantage of what exists today to serve better our users.

At the same time we want to use our creativity to help users solve their current problems.

That is what I would like to see more for everybody in the PHP community

Projects will succeed if they provide something different and better than what existed in the past and the users want.

That is what we try to do within our possibilities.

The greatest challenge is to survive as a viable business that needs to pay many bills during a long time and still provide products and services of good quality.

Still we do not give up no matter what other people will say. Success in life depends more on what you do than want other people say.

We have a focus to serve the PHP Classes site users. Those users are the most important asset of a community. We always listen to comments from all users. Often we take notes of features that would be good to have so we can implement those features soon or later.

Therefore I would like to thank all users that bothered to share their points of view with us. If we did not yet implement a feature that you requested, it is very likely in the implementation queue.

So please keep sending your comments and improvement suggestions. That is the best way you can see what you would like to see in the site in the future.

3. PHP Classes Marketplace to Help Developers to Sell More Products and Services

One request that we got from many users is to have a way to make more money from their work with PHP.

Many developers work for other companies on the products or services of those companies. They may earn great salaries for a while but is really for doing work to benefit the businesses of those companies.

Since 2015 we have been studying what takes for a business to be sucessful. It is a complex subject. Here is just a list of aspects that businesses need to take care:

1. Founder: What are the founder's dreams

2. Team: Who wants to collaborate with the founder

3. Focus: community interested in what the team can build

4. Research: what products or services the community wants

5. Development: how to develop products or services the community dreams about

6. Pricing: how to calculate a fair price for the products and services that were developed

7. Launch: how to introduce the products and services to the community

8. Advertising: how to tell the community about the products and services that are available

9. Sales: how to persuade the interested user to buy the products or services

10. Support: how to help the users to use the products and services that are available

11. Payouts: how to send the profit share split to the partner companies

12. Finances: how to reinvest the generated revenue in sustaining the business

13. Growth: how to increase the focus of the community that is reached by the business

14. Mentoring: how to teach partners to do their part of the work

15. Project: how to manage the tasks and priorities of the work to be done

The marketplace of the PHP Classes site is an evolution of the shopping section. We are opening the shopping section to list and sell products and services of other companies that also serve the PHP developers market.

It seems to be a simple evolution but the implementation is very complex. We need to split our work time between maintaining the existing site features and the development of the marketplace.

Right now we are working on the integration of the products and services of other companies so they can be made available for sale soon.

I will get back to this topic of the marketplace with more details in a future article. For now be certain that we want to make the marketplace as business as a service. If you want to become a partner, we will do everything that you do not do.

For instance, if you look at the list of aspects above and you just want to do the development part, we will do all other parts at no financial cost to the partners.

The marketplace is expected to launch soon as we are finishing the integration of partner products and services. Stay tuned to an upcoming article when the marketplace is launched.

4. New Project to Teach How to Become a Successful Business Owner

Anybody that wants to do good work in any area needs to learn about aspects that are new for a person that does not yet have experience in those aspects.

We are already working on a new project to teach about everything you need to know to have a successful business.

It will be a site based on the code of the PHP Classes site adapted to teach all business aspects mentioned in the previous section of this article.

I do not have yet a release date in mind because it will require new feature development. I will announce it when it is ready to launch.