It’s still popular af. Almost half of any cms site online is powered by Wordpress. Many sales sites use woocommerce (Wordpress plugin). Message boards for sure (phpbb!). Moodle and other similar learning management tools run on PHP. Other cms systems like drupal and joomla make up another big portion of cms installs. I think the custom Wikipedia (mediawiki?) is php.
PHP is ONLY popular because of mainly wordpress. Usage outside the big CMS are minimal at best, in 2026. I dont see much greenfield / PHP jobs that are not legacy software these days.
There's very little green-field PHP being written, but there's an awful lot of the Internet that was written over the last 30 years, and there's also a lot of very popular turn-key software (eg. WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB) that gets redeployed on new sites by people who just want something user-friendly that works.
I slopcoded my own forum software in Elixir/Phoenix recently, starting from my memories of phpBB and SMF forums I used to run. I’m using it as a forum for my vintage camera stall as I have a lot of people who enjoy hanging out at the stall, and it turns out they enjoy hanging out on a retro forum too.
I do want to add some stupid forum features I remember from the 2000s. An RPG mod is definitely on my mind.
phpBB, vbulletin, and XenForo still power more than you might realize - often websites that still have comments are using one of those as a back-end, even if you can't access it directly.
It’s still popular af. Almost half of any cms site online is powered by Wordpress. Many sales sites use woocommerce (Wordpress plugin). Message boards for sure (phpbb!). Moodle and other similar learning management tools run on PHP. Other cms systems like drupal and joomla make up another big portion of cms installs. I think the custom Wikipedia (mediawiki?) is php.
Yeah, I thought it was dying a bit but was looking for webmail software (Roundcube, etc) a couple days ago and all of it is PHP.
PHP is ONLY popular because of mainly wordpress. Usage outside the big CMS are minimal at best, in 2026. I dont see much greenfield / PHP jobs that are not legacy software these days.
There's very little green-field PHP being written, but there's an awful lot of the Internet that was written over the last 30 years, and there's also a lot of very popular turn-key software (eg. WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB) that gets redeployed on new sites by people who just want something user-friendly that works.
Hack (Meta) is presumably contributing somewhat to PHP’s continued existence.
I'm not sure that's true. It seems very popular in OSS in general but not much enterprise/commercial uptake.
I guess node has taken some market share it seems like
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I just got a nostalgia hit remembering all the phpBB type boards.
But also I haven’t seen much of that style of bulletin boards in ages. Maybe the occasional EEVBlog or Ars kinda count?
I slopcoded my own forum software in Elixir/Phoenix recently, starting from my memories of phpBB and SMF forums I used to run. I’m using it as a forum for my vintage camera stall as I have a lot of people who enjoy hanging out at the stall, and it turns out they enjoy hanging out on a retro forum too.
I do want to add some stupid forum features I remember from the 2000s. An RPG mod is definitely on my mind.
phpBB, vbulletin, and XenForo still power more than you might realize - often websites that still have comments are using one of those as a back-end, even if you can't access it directly.
How dare your forget PHPnuke.
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It's still the most widely used server side language on the web thanks to WordPress, unless that has changed recently (it was dropping)
Facebook is developed on a reimplementation of PHP!