What's the most compelling way to talk about "why use PHP today"?

notes.md

I'm excited to have the chance to work with the PHP Foundation to help get some more modern design and messaging on the PHP site.

One place I've gotten some access is to be able to contribute to a new page, "Why use PHP"? I built a site a few years back called "Why PHP" but let it die, so it's fun to work on this again.

You can see the current status of the the page here:

• The PR: php/web-php#1172
• The Preview: https://web-php-pr-1172.preview.thephp.foundation/why-use-php

I'd like to take a step back from this existing page and ask the broader questions:

• Who is the target audience of this page?
• What are their concerns we want to address?

I have some initial thoughts, but I'm throwing this up in a Gist so we can have a conversation about it.

My initial thoughts:

• As a consultant who sells PHP development services, my primary target for this page is a decision-maker at a company considering PHP. My imaginary user is someone I meet often: a VC, or a CEO, or a super high level CTO, who has people beneath them advocating for Laravel. They, or someone they know, have a strong anti-PHP bias. "It's old", "it doesn't scale", "it's for small apps", "it doesn't have the latest technology", "it can't work with AI as well", etc... and they need to be convinced, as easily as possible, that PHP is a legitimate modern toolset that's been used to build many impressive apps.
• Their concerns are that PHP is all the bad things. I'd love to put together a list of those bad things. You can see a few in my previous point. It's old, it's slow, it doesn't scale, it's "bad"

Some initial ideas of what could address these concerns:

• A kind of anti-FUD FAQ, but instead of frequently asked questions, it's frequently held misconceptions
• Big companies using PHP
• Companies putting money into PHP, maybe?
• Whitepapers or other kinds of performance and scale metrics. Very simple views on this page, with links for anyone who wants to dig in (which will be basically no one, but just as proof)

So, if you're in the PHP world, and you have run into a problem from PHP's reputation, that could be solved by this page, whether you're a consultant like me or you're trying to show your boss why you should use PHP or keep using PHP: Who are we talking to here? What are the main criticisms/concerns we're trying to address? What could we include that would be most valuable in that direction?

Conversations happening elsewhere, pasting here:

• Target schools, universities, and bootcamps; "show them yes, PHP is still relevant today, and can be a great puzzle piece to complete the 'full stack' story in their curriculum"
• You don't need a lot of services for PHP. For the cost of a domain registration and the smallest DO droplet, you can have a completely functioning website that one person can build.
• James links this article: https://developer.vonage.com/en/blog/php-is-legacy-in-2024

I would add mentions to some popular "advanced" tools like PHPStan, Rector, Psalm, etc

Another conversation elsewhere:

• Easy to onboard new devs
• Easy to get good enough to ship

I originally came from the Next.js world and, like many, I had the usual bias: “PHP is old” and “It’s not modern.” But then I watched Aaron Francis’s video, “PHP Doesn’t Suck,” and his “Todo App” example completely blew my mind.

The fact that I could build all of that using just Laravel—without needing to install dozens of packages or rely on 10+ SaaS services (one for auth, one for ORM, another for notifications, queue, web sockets, storage, and so on)—was a game changer. Laravel gives you all of that out of the box, and it made me realize how powerful and cohesive the PHP ecosystem has become.

So i am sure a lot of people like me if they see this side of the php and it's amazing ecosystem (like laravel-news, laracast, laravelDaily, securing laravel, spatie packages, filament, ...) i am sure most people will start to consider it

@DanielHemmati Fantastic notes-- thank you! And thanks for the reminder of Aaron's video/etc.!

Not sure if others feel the same way, but I wrote a couple of paragraphs on nativephp.com to explain Why PHP?

Verbatim:

PHP is great. It's a mature language that has been honed for 30 years in one of the most ruthless environments: the web.

Despite the odds, it remains one of the most used languages worldwide and continues to grow in usage every day.

Its shared-nothing approach to memory safety makes it an unexpectedly productive candidate for building native applications.

Its focus on HTTP as a paradigm for building applications lends itself towards using the incredibly accessible web technologies to build rich UIs that can feel at home on any platform.

Hi! Lecturer here, advocating for PHP/Laravel and encountering some of the misconceptions you mention ("it's old").
I think this is a great initiative! Some misconceptions are never challenged by beginners (they simply don't have the knowledge to assess those), steering a lot of them away from PHP.

I think of three main audiences:

1. Tech decision makers, like you mentioned
2. Developers
3. Beginners, students, people breaking into new stuff

I'd argue two pages/themes are the most interesting, depending on the audience:

What's being built in PHP (and frameworks)

Aka: why PHP, for business/product
Audience (mostly): tech decision makers, developers

Possible content:

• Start with companies and things they've built. This challenges a lot of misconceptions: "if it worked out for (big brand), it might work for us". Too much focus on Wordpress alone doesn't help, as some associate it with small/medium sized sites, although it powers a big part of the web
• Misconceptions / strengths: going more in depth for those triggered by the examples

What would be great, is a link to frameworks like Laravel, but for a product-based site.
Something non-tech people would also understand, giving them an overview what the framework is (not) suited for.

Getting started

Aka: why PHP, for builders
Audience (mostly): developers, beginners

• What's needed for a hello world page: server setup + basic syntax. Beginners often already know (some) JS, and the setup can be intimidating and feel like extra hassle. Tools like Laravel Herd go a long way easing the learning curve
• Comparison to well known languages: how to do typing coming from JS/TypeScript
• Most popular frameworks and when (not) to use them, with a technical focus

In an ideal world, multiple pages would be great: getting started (as a junior / coming from JS / coming from x / ...)

General remark: while the first impression of Laravel is really modern, for the PHP docs it's not.
If a design update is on the table, it could do wonders.

Been working on this in the background a little, and just got a request from a friend that feels relevant:

Do you have any good articles bookmarked where people are discussing the top reasons why businesses aren't using Laravel or PHP for their software projects? I feel like you must hear this a lot. So maybe you could even rattle off a top 10 or top 5 pretty easily? I would be curious what the biggest "misconceptions" are these days.

Let me think through my responses out loud here.

For starters, who objects to Laravel specifically?

In my experience, it's only PHP developers who have a preference for another tool or way of working. At best, they just like their tool better. At worst, they've developed a negative opinion of Laravel for the following reasons:

• "I'm a consultant and I've rescued bad Laravel projects"
• Laravel is good fro starting projects but it doesn't scale
• Laravel doesn't use the patterns I prefer, or uses patterns I dislike (e.g. the Facade pattern).

Honestly, I heard these things a lot in Laravel's early days, and don't really hear it anymore. The only practical criticism I've heard of Laravel is that some folks have found it hard to hire expert Laravel devs, but I've always been able to solve that for them easily.

However... I still often hear objections to PHP. Most common:

• It doesn't scale (the assumption is to large amounts of data or large amounts of traffic)
• It's out of date and doesn't use new technology
• It's not secure
• People don't use it for big projects

Please note that none of these are actually valid points or criticisms of PHP (which is funny, because there are valid criticisms of PHP, but they're not represented in these).

Someone might point out the classically unhelpful "PHP is a fractal of bad design" article, but to be honest, information like this are mainly used (or, more often, were used in the past) by nerds to complain to other nerds. The people making actually practical decisions don't understand, or care, about any of that.

Put my notes together here: https://gist.github.com/mattstauffer/64f8a22d29c9ff2b0028911fc8e84026

Once it feels like this is the right overall structure, I can start building out potential content from it.