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.

▲

nostrademons a day ago | parent | next [-]

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.

▲

sgarland 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hack (Meta) is presumably contributing somewhat to PHP’s continued existence.

	▲	phplovesong 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I dont see much Hack out in the wild. Its basically only Meta that uses it for facebook. Also kind of funny that PHP was so BAD that they actually had the write their own language.

▲

nijave a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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

▲

cowlevel a day ago | parent | next [-]

What else is using it and popular? Mediawiki - that's true. And some forums, but forums aren't popular any more.

	▲	whycome a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No way. Forums are still incredibly popular. Something like RedFlagDeals has an entire business based around their forum and get close to 40m page views per month and more than 3m uniques. And there are at least 3 other hugely popular php based forums that I occasionally check — and those are just for my own niche interests.
	▲	dvdkon a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Nextcloud, the mentioned Roundcube, plenty non-Wordpress CMSs, many internal tools I work with daily...

▲

phplovesong 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nah. There is legacy, then there is the (now dying) wordpress/drupal/<php-cms> shops that still run PHP. Custom apps are not done in PHP, unless its a (usually) unskilled dev who knows no better.

With AI, there is little need for PHP in 2026, even for the novice dev. The onl thing PHP had in the early 2000s was the FTP deployment story, but that has long faded. I van deploy a go binary WAY easier than a PHP application.