And it's not cheap to pay that many people, especially not full time (which is partly why they don't have more full-time contractors). According to https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation#category-BUDGET they only have a balance $350k currently, sinking.
It'd be really awesome, if more companies would sponsor the PHP foundation (especially with thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year. A lot of small contributions is nice, but not enough.). The work of a few core maintainers is really crucial to the continued development of PHP.
The entire internet from that era is still built on it.
I worked at a major CDN with roots in the dot com era. PHP errywhere. You wanna log on and see your bill you're invoking like 40 different (modern containerized) lamp stacks.
It is used all over the place in ways you don't even realize. "not very technical or providers of services to the cheap and not very technical" is a particular corner of the market that is visible and full of PHP, sure, but you don't see the huge masses of PHP code running that doesn't expose a .php on the end of the URL.
I understand why people still have this perception, I imagine due to relics of the past of the PHP 5 (or earlier) era. But those days are long gone, and I believe PHP 8 has some a nice job of adding modern features and improving developer experience.
Wordpress is the obvious answer to your question, but its codebase is admittedly still stuck in the past in many ways. Nobody would write it that way if they were starting from scratch today.
There are plenty of “serious” companies using Laravel or Symfony. Take a look around those codebases if you want to get an idea of what solid modern PHP design patterns look like nowadays. Nothing “cheap or not very technical” about them :)
Some Amazon sites, they said. Lots of random companies and institutions: a Danish IT company, a Dutch cybersecurity company, Orange telecoms (in France). Various governments' sites for various services. Some BBC TV show pages, a gym group, a Japanese airline, Asahi (the brewers), Finland's state IT provider.
I suppose my question would be: what would be the reason to choose PHP in 2026 for a greenfield project over the plethora of other available languages?
It does. Just look at quality of the documentation for starters.
Laravel is really excellent. PHP’s package manager, Composer, is great, and Laravel makes excellent use of it. The two main front end tools, Livewire and Inertia, are fun, with good starter kits. It has an elegant built in AI SDK, an official LLM developer integration, good payments support. There’s a new typescript binding. It has, IMO, one of the few truly well-designed ORM implementations.
There’s an incredible community around it. Lighthouse, the schema-first GraphQL package, is one of the neatest I have seen.
And PHP 8.x is a much more capable language than people expect. LLMs speak it well and are typically very up to date with its capabilities.
ETA: I think one of the things that sets it apart from other environments is the sense that it has a mature clarity of purpose, to be honest. In this AI-slop-documentation era, have a look at the documentation, the clarity of it, the ease of onboarding. Laravel as a project tends to execute well on ideas, has sensible defaults etc.; it just feels grown-up. It moves a little slower than other frameworks in terms of innovation, but sweats the details. It also has a well-managed upgrade process.
Unfortunately, I think PHP, and ultimately Ruby, Python, Perl, and Node.js, will all eventually be proven to be inappropriate for web development. It feels to me like we are heading away from a world where every application sits on top of an interpreter and a huge attack surface.
For myself, I really like Laravel; I have deployed apps in it that did good things for people and it was never once in my way. It has been fun, simple, even quite poetic to use. But I think I am done with these sorts of programming environments, and I am going to force myself back to things with a smaller footprint.
I certainly think that one aspect of PHP has to change, and that is the tendency to deploy with distro packages. That is clearly an inappropriate burden in the LLM-assisted hacking era.
Isn't there some large php based software run by a bruised ego who can't even get his own house in order, let alone help fund his largesse, but complains about his leeches.
There are countless applications out there still running on PHP, but if the community interest can't raise the required resources to maintain the tool, maybe it's time for it to die, or at least downgrade into maintenance mode so in time it'll become a legacy language.
The “community” has only just managed to find the resources to maintain NTP. I think if “nobody is donating” is your standard for whether things should live or die, then we are all hopelessly fucked.
My standard is not having a single full-time employee without the proper resources to maintain the technology. If the community would find the resources, all is well, but better than to run it on fumes would be to give everyone time to move on.
OK, but you understand that by that same standard you’d have sunsetted NTP. Harlan Stenn was maintaining it for a pittance; nowhere near a full developer salary.
If Automattic funded the PHP Foundation with 8% of their revenue [1], like what Matt Mullenweg asked from companies using WordPress [2], the PHP Foundation would have lots of money.
I take your point and it’s not 8% of their revenue, I guess, but they do give the PHP Foundation a quarter of a million dollars a year. AFAIK they are the biggest contributor?
And then people complain about "bait and switch " or "pulling the rug" when an OSS project becomes successful and tries to fund itself in some way. "But that should be free" shouts everyone. I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that OSS was the biggest swindle the corporations managed to pull off.
bwoebi 12 hours ago
https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation/transactions?search... and https://opencollective.com/php-foundation-eur/transactions?s...
(seems like "work" selects most of that)
And it's not cheap to pay that many people, especially not full time (which is partly why they don't have more full-time contractors). According to https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation#category-BUDGET they only have a balance $350k currently, sinking.
It'd be really awesome, if more companies would sponsor the PHP foundation (especially with thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year. A lot of small contributions is nice, but not enough.). The work of a few core maintainers is really crucial to the continued development of PHP.
MattGaiser 11 hours ago
It overwhelmingly seems like the language of the cheap and not very technical or providers of services to the cheap and not very technical.
justinator 10 hours ago
hdjrudni 9 hours ago
justinator 8 hours ago
cucumber3732842 7 hours ago
I worked at a major CDN with roots in the dot com era. PHP errywhere. You wanna log on and see your bill you're invoking like 40 different (modern containerized) lamp stacks.
jerf 11 hours ago
4ndrewl 10 hours ago
tdeck 7 hours ago
youngtaff 6 minutes ago
40four 7 hours ago
Wordpress is the obvious answer to your question, but its codebase is admittedly still stuck in the past in many ways. Nobody would write it that way if they were starting from scratch today.
There are plenty of “serious” companies using Laravel or Symfony. Take a look around those codebases if you want to get an idea of what solid modern PHP design patterns look like nowadays. Nothing “cheap or not very technical” about them :)
wyclif 8 hours ago
card_zero 7 hours ago
BadBadJellyBean 11 hours ago
swat535 10 hours ago
40four 7 hours ago
swat535 6 hours ago
Like if I were to sell PHP in 2026 to a new team, how would I position it?
dofm 5 hours ago
Laravel is really excellent. PHP’s package manager, Composer, is great, and Laravel makes excellent use of it. The two main front end tools, Livewire and Inertia, are fun, with good starter kits. It has an elegant built in AI SDK, an official LLM developer integration, good payments support. There’s a new typescript binding. It has, IMO, one of the few truly well-designed ORM implementations.
There’s an incredible community around it. Lighthouse, the schema-first GraphQL package, is one of the neatest I have seen.
And PHP 8.x is a much more capable language than people expect. LLMs speak it well and are typically very up to date with its capabilities.
ETA: I think one of the things that sets it apart from other environments is the sense that it has a mature clarity of purpose, to be honest. In this AI-slop-documentation era, have a look at the documentation, the clarity of it, the ease of onboarding. Laravel as a project tends to execute well on ideas, has sensible defaults etc.; it just feels grown-up. It moves a little slower than other frameworks in terms of innovation, but sweats the details. It also has a well-managed upgrade process.
Unfortunately, I think PHP, and ultimately Ruby, Python, Perl, and Node.js, will all eventually be proven to be inappropriate for web development. It feels to me like we are heading away from a world where every application sits on top of an interpreter and a huge attack surface.
For myself, I really like Laravel; I have deployed apps in it that did good things for people and it was never once in my way. It has been fun, simple, even quite poetic to use. But I think I am done with these sorts of programming environments, and I am going to force myself back to things with a smaller footprint.
I certainly think that one aspect of PHP has to change, and that is the tendency to deploy with distro packages. That is clearly an inappropriate burden in the LLM-assisted hacking era.
bawolff 9 hours ago
Wikipedia
Wordpress
wingmanjd 10 hours ago
They recently posted about how to patch their software from the command-line (https://www.netgate.com/blog/critical-php-security-update)
tdeck 7 hours ago
cyanydeez 10 hours ago
Hrmmm.
Hamuko 11 hours ago
Also, not a company but Wikimedia Foundation definitely has some funds too.
pkaye 10 hours ago
damontal 10 hours ago
brettermeier 9 hours ago
gchamonlive 12 hours ago
dofm 4 hours ago
gchamonlive 4 hours ago
dofm 4 hours ago
gchamonlive 3 hours ago
londons_explore 11 hours ago
Plenty of companies can donate 0.1 engineers to work on php, if for no other reason than to make php better for their own use cases.
gchamonlive 10 hours ago
And asking harder? How does harder look like in comparison to regular asking?
hdjrudni 9 hours ago
gchamonlive 6 hours ago
Better than running on fumes would be to honourably phase out and give people time to move on.
ValentineC 9 hours ago
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g6qi8i/automatt...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/automattic-planned-to-targ...
dofm 4 hours ago
https://www.therepository.email/automattics-anne-mccarthy-jo...
https://x.com/ThePHPF/status/1853390265429508427
pamcake 9 hours ago
NewJazz 7 hours ago
grokys 12 hours ago