Wikipedia
MediaWiki is free and open-source software developed in 2002 to power Wikipedia. Initially, the intention to create MediaWiki was to run Wikipedia. It uses PHP running on a MySQL database. MediaWiki remains in use by almost all other Wikimedia platforms, such as Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata.
MediaWiki was initially written in PHP programming language and stores all text content into a database. This platform is one of the largest websites in the world with high scalability and internationalization (available in more than 300 languages), proving the effectiveness of PHP programming language that is “simple to work with” for developers and easiness and convenience working with other languages and databases.
Other important programming languages include JavaScript for many essential components of MediaWiki such as VisualEditor, Persoid, and all Gadgets. Python language is widespread for developing tools like Pywikibot, while Ruby is the base language for the browser test engine (Cucumber) as well as is popular in the Puppet deployment system.
Compared to Facebook, in 2014, they switched to HHVM, accelerating the loading time for the page data.
Tumblr
One of the world’s most famous microblogging and social networking website, Tumblr, was founded in 2007 by David Karp. Its former and first CTO is Marco Arment, who wrote Tumblr, Instapaper, and Second Crack in PHP. According to Arment, it is perfectly possible to write good PHP code. He says:
“Tumblr, Instapaper, and some of our old consulting clients use a great PHP-5-only MVC framework that we've written over the last four years, which puts us in a great position: we have the advantages of knowing what all of the code does and where to fix bugs or add features, but we also have this mature, proven framework to do the heavy lifting and enforce good code structure.”
In 2016, Tumblr transitioned to PHP7, creating new language features for implementation, including scalar type hints and return type declarations. Tumblr community currently has over 555 million monthly visitors and has generated over 325 million blogs.
Slack
One of the most popular and in-demand workplace communication tools, a single place for messaging, tools, and files - Slack is initially written in JavaScript, Electron, C++, and Hack. For the server-side application logic, Slack uses PHP, which is a bit uncommon. However, the $20+ billion valued viral CMS system confirms that PHP provides better support for building, changing, and operating a successful project than other competing environments.
Perhaps, these and many other likewise PHP advantages pushed Slack to use this programming language. Slack currently has more than 10 million daily active users who spend on average 9 hours each day on the platform. To this extent, the paid version is popular as well. It has over 3 million subscribers. According to Slack user stats, over 43% of Fortune 100 businesses use the paid version of Slack.
Currently, Slack actively hires PHP developers along with the above-enumerated websites.
WordPress
The world’s most popular, in-demand, widely used, and free open-source content management system, WordPress, was written in PHP and is paired with a MySQL and MariaDB database. WordPress still uses PHP to interact with databases and fetch data.
PHP helps fetch essential components from the database and output them as static HTML. It allows millions of daily users with no programming skills to create and use templates, drag and drop website UI components, etc.
WordPress uses PHP for its core files. It includes a handful of functions, hooks, classes, and methods that can use both programmers and ordinary users to extend WordPress functionality in many helpful ways.
How is PHP used in WordPress?
Download the latest copy of WordPress from WordPress.org, open the ZIP file, and you will see that most of the included core WordPress files are PHP. Ultimately, all the themes and plugins that you install will contain a significant amount of PHP files.
Example:
In the ZIP file, you’ll find such separate PHP files as:
- Sidebar.php
- Header.php
- Comments.php, etc.
Each of these files connects to the similarly named area on the front end of your site:
Such as sidebar.php dictates how your sidebar area looks and functions, header.php dictates how your header looks and functions, while comments.php will dictate how your comments section will look and function.
The Future of PHP
PHP has come a long way from its roots as a template parsing system that would run C functions as it encountered tags. PHP is far away from being a dead language. The latest version of PHP (8.0) offers full object-oriented capabilities, an opt-in strict typing system, JIT compiler, database extensions, robust data, time processing tools, and more.
These improvements and capabilities prove that PHP is up to thriving. PHP will be in-demand in the future to continue powering CMSs (content management systems), e-commerce, CRMs (customer relationship management systems), source management systems, ERP systems (enterprise resource planning systems), and more.
APIs feeding mobile applications and business communication will still rely on PHP.
The new features in PHP 8 will help increase employee productivity, decrease maintenance, and improve performance (JIT). JIT compiler has the potential of providing inroads into system programming and machine learning.
We expect the PHP ecosystem to diversify much more in the future. There will be gaining traction for testing tools and automation. Companies will increase the usage of containers to deploy applications.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, PHP is a programming language with history and rich expertise. It has seen significant ups and downs, and yet, it is still much competitive in the ICT industry. PHP backs up leading social platforms and open-source software solutions, recording magnificent successes.
International business owners and leaders still hire dedicated PHP programmers and rely on PHP development. PHP is here to stay!
