First official State of PHP Survey. Ever. The PHP Foundation teamed up with JetBrains (PhpStorm) to make it happen. Not another opinion piece, not another framework debate. Actual signal, straight from developers, about what works and what doesn't. I've spent years in PHP codebases, and most of the feedback I hear about the language never makes it past a Slack channel or a rant at a conference afterparty. This is a chance to actually get it on record. 15 minutes. Fully anonymized. Results and raw dataset published for anyone to dig into afterward. If you write in PHP: fill it out. If you know someone who does: send it their way. More responses = a clearer picture of where PHP should go next. #State_Of_PHP

This survey is vital to the continued development of PHP, and helps shed light on the important role it plays in software. If you’re in my network and work with PHP, take the survey!

What's stopping you from upgrading to newer PHP versions? That's a great question from State of PHP 2026 survey from The PHP Foundation and JetBrains. Legacy codebase. Framework compatibility. Fear of downtime. Lack of engineering time. All valid, all real, all in the survey. But I want to go one level deeper - because "legacy codebase" can mean a hundred different things. Is it deprecated functions like mysql_* that force a rewrite? Encrypted vendor code via ionCube that nobody can touch? A Composer dependency graph so tangled that updating one package breaks five others? Or is it simpler than that - no staging environment, so any upgrade is a gamble on production? Those are completely different problems with completely different fixes. So we put together a short follow-up survey, digging into the specifics: technical debt, third-party dependencies, business constraints, infrastructure. Survey: https://lnkd.in/ehPYKwGE Once we've got enough answers, I'll share what we find in a follow-up post - real numbers on what's actually keeping PHP teams stuck, not just guesses. Got a specific blocker that's not even on the list? Feel free to tell me in DM.

I hand-rolled a priority queue once. Spent a solid afternoon on it, and then a few weeks later I stumbled across SplPriorityQueue in the docs and felt the specific kind of embarrassment that only comes from reinventing something that's been sitting in your standard library the whole time. SplStack, SplQueue, SplPriorityQueue, and SplFixedArray all come bundled with PHP. I just assumed if I needed a "real" data structure, I'd have to build it or grab a Composer package. Turns out I was really wrong, and PHP's Standard PHP Library has been quietly waiting for me to notice it. RecursiveDirectoryIterator makes recursive file traversal actually manageable. SplFileInfo gives you typed file path handling instead of string soup. DateTimeImmutable is one I now reach for by default, because regular DateTime is mutable and will happily mutate your original object if you forget to clone it first. What's your version of this? I'm genuinely curious what the "wait, PHP has that?" moment looks like for other developers. #PHP #PHPDev

I noticed that the php-shared host version did not have functions to edit entities before approval. This has now been fixed. The PHP edition now has full entity editing: Changes committed:   • php/src/Router.php - Added entityEdit() and entityUpdate() handlers with routes   • php/templates/entity_edit.php (new) - Full edit form with Save/Save & approve/Save & reject   • php/templates/entities.php - Added Edit link column   • installers/php-host/bkbs-php-edition.zip - Rebuilt with changes Features added:   • Click "Edit" on any entity row → opens edit form   • Edit all fields: name, type, description, status, trust level, notes, JSON fields   • Three save buttons: "Save changes", "Save & approve", "Save & reject"   • Bulk approve/reject still works as before Github Repository: https://lnkd.in/dXuw_Uzx

PHP isn't dead for web scraping. It's just quiet about it. 🐘 Most servers already run it, database integration ships built-in via PDO, and Composer pulls in an HTTP client with 1 command. In this video, we build a full scraper with Guzzle and Symfony DOM crawler, targeting a sandbox site with 1K books across 50 pages, then export everything to CSV. We also cover: 🧑💻 Setting realistic headers and retry logic with backoff ❌ Rotating residential proxies to avoid IP blocks at scale 💡 When to reach for a headless browser instead of curl If PHP's already your stack, there's no reason to switch languages just to scrape. Watch the full video and grab the code in the comments 👇

PHP Checkup – Keeping Your Applications Healthy in 2026 June has a way of focusing the mind. The conference season has wound down, the hallway conversations and late-night discussions at WurstCon have settled into plans, and now it’s time to build — carefully, thoughtfully, and with an eye toward what happens when real users and real data show up. This month’s issue is built around exactly that kind of thinking: what does it look like to write code that is secure, concurrent, and designed to last? The post PHP Checkup – Keeping Your Applications Healthy in 2026 appeared first on PHP Architect. https://lnkd.in/dpvnZxEd

I’m excited to share the first version of Friendix, a social media platform I built using PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. This first version includes: • User registration and login • Date-of-birth validation with a minimum age of 13 • Text, photo, and video posts • Poll creation and voting • Reactions, comments, and post sharing • A responsive and user-friendly interface Friendix is still a work in progress. I’ll continue improving it, adding new features, and sharing more videos as each update is released. I’d love to hear your ideas: What feature would you like to see added to Friendix next? GitHub: https://lnkd.in/eGahJ3pD #PHP #MySQL #JavaScript #WebDevelopment #FullStackDevelopment #SoftwareDevelopment #PortfolioProject

PHP shipped security releases for four versions at once today, 8.2 through 8.5. The most boring sentence in tech, and the reason half the web keeps working. Two things worth saying about that. First, the practical one: if you run PHP, patch before lunch. Coordinated security releases exist because someone found something worth coordinating around. Second, the quiet one. People have been calling PHP dead for as long as I've been writing it. Dead platforms don't get four-branch security releases on the same day. That takes maintainers, a release process, and a community that still shows up. Maintenance is the least glamorous signal in this whole industry, and the most honest one. When I'm picking a stack to bet the next decade on, I don't look at the launch hype. I look at whether it's still boring in year eight. Release notes are here — patch before lunch 👇 https://lnkd.in/g2RF3SCe #php #laravel #softwareengineering #webdevelopment #developer

Vocalizer just landed as a native PHP extension, and it is a solid piece of engineering for anyone doing text-to-speech in a PHP app. Instead of calling out to an external API, it embeds two inference backends (sherpa-onnx and audio.cpp) directly and ships as a prebuilt binary, so there is nothing to compile. A few things stood out to me: - One API covers eight model families, including Chatterbox, Piper/VITS, and Kokoro, auto-detected from the model directory - Voice cloning from a short 3-10 second reference WAV across 23 languages - An anti-hallucination guard that checks Chatterbox output for skipped text or silence and re-synthesizes with a new seed if something looks off - Crash isolation via fork mode, so a native engine crash gets retried instead of killing the PHP worker - Async synthesis with speakAsync(), useful for longer texts off the request path It currently supports Linux x86-64 with PHP 8.4 or 8.5 NTS, and it is MIT licensed. Local TTS without runtime API dependency is a real win for cost and latency in PHP apps that need voice output, whether that is notifications, accessibility features, or IVR-style systems. #Laravel #PHP #WebDevelopment #BackendDevelopment #Developer #TextToSpeech