Can anyone recommend any good free online articles about extending PHP. Writing my own extensions. Thanks in advance.

Why not go to the horses mouth?

www.php.net/~wez/extending-php.pdf

Thanks, that will do. Time to get dirty and educate myself.

THIS is what I was talking about CHRIS!!!!

Do they just let ANYBODY (with the capability to do so) extend the language?

OMFG, okay...

Now, what do the people who make developments to the language get? Money? Job Offers? What?!

It's open source. Anyone can create extensions, but that doesn't mean those extensions become part of the official release.

People choose to contribute for various reasons. Some people or companies need to create new or different functionality for their own purposes and may choose to release their work. Some people just want to contribute, and depending on the quality of their work they may get job offers or have something to put on their resume. This applies to pretty much any open source software.

Originally Posted by NullPointer

...Anyone can create extensions, but that doesn't mean those extensions become part of the official release.

Does the (OS) community get to vote on whether or not an extension becomes part of the language from now on, or not? WHO is in charge of making those/these decisions?

Originally Posted by NullPointer

Some people just want to contribute, and depending on the quality of their work they may get job offers or have something to put on their resume. This applies to pretty much any open source software.

Yeah, just like programmers and modders of games. Some do it for hobby, some people are seriously trying to get noticed.

I just wasn't sure whether "the PHP people"/Zend sought out really worthwhile contributions/contributors and said to themselves, "heck, we can afford to hire this guy", etc.

To be honest I'm not at all familiar with the inner workings of The PHP Group or their relationship to Zend. I'm sure Zend expects prospective employees to be familiar with PHP, which does not necessarily involve creating extensions.

You can probably learn a lot more than what I can tell you by doing a little research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Php

This is a very good topic for me, as a neighbour who is studying at ITT recently gave me a book on C

Originally Posted by Lashtal

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Do they just let ANYBODY (with the capability to do so) extend the language

Have you looked at the syntax of some of the functions.

As I've said before, PHP looks like it was written by a committee, and the members didn't actually speak to each other.