astions wrote:stereofrog wrote:That's easy: the best programmers in php are those who coded best php projects. Just google for simpletest, wact, swift, cakephp and you'll find them all.

That's not really what I'm looking for.
Thats what your going to get.
Most projects are not *really* innovative but knock offs (and occasional improvements) of an original works; especially in open source (I've researched most open source CMS's and none are really innovative).
You might have to look outside of the realm of PHP for innovatation:
1) Spirit (
http://spirit.sourceforge.net/)
2) jQuery (I am not familiar with prototype, etc but coming from a background in dealing with the DOM and it's cross browser madness this really left me impressed).
Those are two projects which come to mind. Spirit builds on existing techniques but it's how you can apply that technique which makes it innovative.
I've spent years researching template engines (Smarty, Savant, Velocity, etc) and there is very little innovation in any of them, just little quirks which make it better suited to one environment over another. String Template (
http://www.stringtemplate.org/) author, who is also the author of ANTLR has some interesting articles on the subject, but nothing really earth shattering. The POC I've been working on for the last few years attempts to remove any form of imperative programming from a template and instead uses an advanced pattern recognition algorithm.
Although I have since decided the technique is impractical it is innovative in the sense that an HTML template could be completely edited inside a WYSIWYG editor. Try editing a PHP template inside a WYSIWYG and your PHP source is either ignored or tampered with. If you wanted to change something in the logic of template generation you needed to know PHP. My approach tried tried to predict what the developer/designer intended to do based on the patterns in the template.
Where was I? Oh yea, the point is...those that are well known are seldomly innovative, thats just human nature. They are excellent at marketing themselves whereas innovators are reclusive, awkward and don't like attention, because of fear in having their ideas stolen.
I've looked for exactly what you are looking for, and I didnt' find much.
If I could offer some advice:
Discover a problem you frequently encounter, regardless of which technique or solution you use. Sit down and think of a better way of doing it not just technically (saving RAM or resources) but conceptually. When you do discover something, let me before mentioning it to ANYONE.
If it's one thing I've learned in life, it's this:
Idea's are everything! Although their worth nothing if their never implemented and/or marketed.
I have had that statement re-iterated in my face since I was old enough to attempt to innovate and ask my father for his input. Haha. Crazy old man.
Cheers
