Still Use It?
PHP is best known as the language behind the popular WordPress CMS/framework. It runs the majority of the web but it also has developed a bad reputation.
See Brent’s article on why PHP shouldn’t still be considered a poor choice for modern development. For a modern PHP workflow see Felipe Lopes’ article on FreeCodeCamp.
General Resources
- Awesome PHP (GitHub)
- Design Patterns in PHP (GitHub) – Covers a large number of design patterns and includes code examples.
- PHP The Right Way (GitHub) – Learn best practices and best tooling.
- PHP Best Practices – Low-level, code-focused best practices.
- Clean Code PHP (GitHub) – 7.9k Stars – 10/2019.
- 30 Seconds of PHP Code (GitHub)
- PHP FIG
Tooling
For tooling, including editors, package management, static code analysis, testing, and so on please see our separate PHP Tooling page.
Web Frameworks
- Laravel – 54.4k Stars
- Symfony – 21.5k Stars
- Cake – 7.9k Stars
- CodeIgniter – 17.6k Stars
Async
- Swiftmailer – 8.3k Stars – Email.
- PHPMailer – 13.6k Stars – Email sending library.
Other Packages/Frameworks
- Twig – 6.3k Stars – Template Engine.
- Guzzle – 17.5k Stars – PHP HTTP Client.
- Grav – 11.2k Stars – Flat-file CMS.
- Slim – 10.1k Stars – Micro Framework.
- October – 8.9k Stars – CMS built on Laravel.
Popular Software Written in PHP
- WordPress – 12.8k Stars
- Drupal – 3.3k Stars
- Joomla – 3.3k Stars
- Magento – 7.8k Stars
- Flarum – 10.4k Stars (6/6/20) – Forum Software.
- Monica – 7.7k Stars – Personal CRM.
Learning PHP
- David Hayes. PHP for Beginners: Starting on Backend WordPress Development. wpshout, 2019.
- Starts from the very beginning (what is PHP?) and continues through variables, functions, conditionals, and recommends articles for next steps.
- Fred Meyer. Object-Oriented PHP: The __construct() Magic Method. wpshout, 2018.