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Part of its staying power is also due to Wordpress. If you're looking for an off the shelf CMS you'll almost certainly be considering Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla,

Part of its staying power is also due to Wordpress. If you're looking for an off the shelf CMS you'll almost certainly be considering Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, et al.

lucb1e 8y ago
I could be wrong, but I think the ubiquity of those frameworks/CMSes is rather due to the language's success rather than vice versa. Web hosts made the near universal decision to support PHP as a dynamic language at some point, and the frameworks that were built in PHP then thrived on that. Wordpress wasn't that popular back when I started out with PHP, but PHP was already universally supported by web hosts (hence my learning it). The switch from, uh, I don't know what came before (Perl? Or just a jumble of different languages called by CGI?), to PHP as universal dynamic hosting language, is before my time though.
- ChrisSD 8y ago
  From my memory (which is not the most reliable source) it was a co-dependent relationship initially. PHP gained acceptance as a language for open source web projects, which lead to the likes of phpBB and Wordpress which in turn lead to PHP gaining even more presence on the web. I think the staying power of php is at least in part due to the continued success of popular projects that rely on it, whoever was responsible for its initial successes.
- cthalupa 8y ago
  As someone who worked in the hosting industry before moving to supporting and consulting on cloud stuff, it's a couple of things. A handful of projects really are the driving reason for PHP's ubiquity. Wordpress/Joomla, phpBB/Invision/vBulletin, Magento... The demand for support for these and some smaller and similar projects really drove webhosts to need to support PHP, and for a lot of the standardized tooling webhosts used, such as cPanel/WHM and Plesk, to support not only PHP, but the automated installation of these projects. Sure, WordPress wasn't the first - phpNuke, Postnuke, etc, were really popular CMS tools before WP, but if we're talking staying power, you really can look at the stuff I listed as being why it has stuck around.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  I could be wrong but my recollection was that PHP initially became the only way to do dynamic pages on shared hosts since it had "safe_mode". At least at my first host, if you wanted to use cgi-bin, you had to submit it to their admin who would read the code and vet it for safety before installing it. While safe_mode probably didn't actually solve that many problems it was a good enough excuse that it meant that admins could allow arbitrary PHP without too much worry.
tyingq 8y ago
Similar for self hosted shopping carts. Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart, etc. There are very few complete shopping cart platforms that aren't PHP.

Part of its staying power is also due to Wordpress. If you're looking for an off the shelf CMS you'll almost certainly be considering Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, et al.

lucb1e 8y ago

I could be wrong, but I think the ubiquity of those frameworks/CMSes is rather due to the language's success rather than vice versa. Web hosts made the near universal decision to support PHP as a dynamic language at some point, and the frameworks that were built in PHP then thrived on that. Wordpress wasn't that popular back when I started out with PHP, but PHP was already universally supported by web hosts (hence my learning it). The switch from, uh, I don't know what came before (Perl? Or just a jumble of different languages called by CGI?), to PHP as universal dynamic hosting language, is before my time though.

ChrisSD 8y ago
From my memory (which is not the most reliable source) it was a co-dependent relationship initially. PHP gained acceptance as a language for open source web projects, which lead to the likes of phpBB and Wordpress which in turn lead to PHP gaining even more presence on the web. I think the staying power of php is at least in part due to the continued success of popular projects that rely on it, whoever was responsible for its initial successes.
cthalupa 8y ago
As someone who worked in the hosting industry before moving to supporting and consulting on cloud stuff, it's a couple of things. A handful of projects really are the driving reason for PHP's ubiquity. Wordpress/Joomla, phpBB/Invision/vBulletin, Magento... The demand for support for these and some smaller and similar projects really drove webhosts to need to support PHP, and for a lot of the standardized tooling webhosts used, such as cPanel/WHM and Plesk, to support not only PHP, but the automated installation of these projects. Sure, WordPress wasn't the first - phpNuke, Postnuke, etc, were really popular CMS tools before WP, but if we're talking staying power, you really can look at the stuff I listed as being why it has stuck around.
kalleboo 8y ago
I could be wrong but my recollection was that PHP initially became the only way to do dynamic pages on shared hosts since it had "safe_mode". At least at my first host, if you wanted to use cgi-bin, you had to submit it to their admin who would read the code and vet it for safety before installing it. While safe_mode probably didn't actually solve that many problems it was a good enough excuse that it meant that admins could allow arbitrary PHP without too much worry.

tyingq 8y ago

Similar for self hosted shopping carts. Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart, etc. There are very few complete shopping cart platforms that aren't PHP.