Terry Chay has posted the answer to an interesting question about the PHP language that asks what is something very few know about PHP. The original answer was shared on Quora but he's copied it here for more visibility.

Question: What’s something very few people know about PHP? Answer: It is mind-bogglingly popular for web development. That popularity hasn’t diminished even though conventional wisdom says otherwise…

Over a decade ago, I said about 40% of the top 100 websites use PHP. [...] Overall, almost 80% of the internet is powered by PHP, and that has held steady for years! Newer web languages such as Ruby or NodeJS have only grown at the expense of other languages such as ASP, Java, or Perl.

He also shares some about the role of WordPress in these numbers (a big chunk at 30%) and a guess at how many PHP developers there are in the world right now.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post sharing the current state of PHP MVC frameworks in 2017. The article doesn't focus on any particular list of frameworks (though the more popular ones are used in the examples) and instead focus on the overall trends they've seen in frameworks and their use.

A simple question prompted me to sit down and write this follow up to my article from about a year ago: "Any thoughts about where things are today?"

He suggests that, while several of the major frameworks are still in active development and are seeing new features in recent versions, the front-runners are probably Laravel and Symfony. He includes trend numbers to back this up (popularity, basically) but also briefly touches on others: CakePHP, CodeIgniter and Zend Framework 2. He then breaks it down into two groups: Symfony/Laravel and "the rest". The post wraps up with a look at the rise of microservices, the "destruction of the monolith" and a more recent emphasis on scalability over just features.

A new community resource, built on top of the excellent Composer and Packagist technology that's popular in today's PHP development world, has been released and provides more context about libraries and provides a "rank" for each one - PHPPackages.org.

PHPPackages.org was built to solve the following problems: [it] defines popularity rank for php packages, provide a space for discussion and [helps to] discover which packages use a specific package.

The About page has more information about the site, how they calculate the "popularity" metric, what the various icons mean and what kinds of things you can do on the site. It's a great resource, especially for those wondering who is using their packages and to discover new packages that are more widely used. It has a lot of the same information that the Packagist site contains but that little extra bit of data is quite useful.

In a new post to the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc shares the results of the PHP framework survey the site posted a month back. In it they asked developers for their opinions on favorite frameworks (not necessarily the one they use, but their own personal opinion). For anyone that's been keeping up with the current state of PHP frameworks, the results aren't all that surprising though.

One month ago, we started the annual SitePoint framework popularity survey. Now that the month has expired, it’s time to look at the results and to distribute the prizes. The response was a whopping ~7800 entries, far more than any other survey we’ve held so far, and even after filtering out invalid entries we end up with a formidable number of valid participants.

According to the results the most popular framework, by far, was Laravel. Coming in second was Symfony2 and third the Nette framework. They did ask for different opinions for personal versus business choices but the results track the same between the two. He also splits out the data into the top results by country and by the age of the people who responded.

He finishes off the post with some of his own thoughts on why Laravel was the clear winner with only some of it having to do with the framework itself. He points out the related projects, "near perfect documentation" and other things (like Laravel's own subreddit). He suggests that, even though open source and "free" tend to go together, spending money and a good amount of time on a project can help ensure it succeeds. He also offers some practical advice for those wanting to give their project a boost:

Spread the word, analyze solutions from other people, discuss them. Be open, be transparent. Have an official blog, get a StackOverflow tag, justify your decisions, get in touch with popular publications which can help promote your framework if you present it well enough.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a request for responses to a survey about which PHP framework you consider to be the best for 2015.

Almost a year and a half ago we published the results of a framework survey on the PHP channel. The survey, while producing fewer entries than our IDE survey still provided us with valuable insight into our audience and the state of individual vs. team developers out there.

With Laravel 5 fresh out of the oven, Phalcon being kickstarted into full-time development, and others reaching a much anticipated maturity, it’s only natural we’re curious about your preferences – have they changed? Do they remain unbudged? Do you wish you could switch so hard you can taste it, but aren’t allowed to by your company? We’re interested in all these points and much more.

The survey will run for a month and there's some prizes involved for the top "resharers" of the survey. You can submit your own votes directly through the post at the bottom. Questions range from which framework you prefer to which you use at your place of employment and why each was chosen. Submit your answers today and help get a better idea of the PHP framework landscape.

On the SitePoint PHP blog Bruno Skvorc has posted what could be "best PHP frameworks for 2014". The results were compiled from the feedback of a survey they recently took during the past week.

We asked these questions to decide which frameworks deserve our attention in 2014 the most. The prerequisite for participation was merely having experience in more than one framework, seeing as it's pointless to ask someone what their favorite bar was if they've only drunk in one place.

In the end, the results showed some interesting trends in the choice of PHP framework and their overall popularity. The three topping the popularity charts were (in this order) Laravel, Phalcon then Symfony2. Other mainstay frameworks like Zend Framework, Yii and CodeIgniter were ranked lower in the list. He goes through the results and provides a bit of background on the feedback, including how much of the original data had to be filtered out for one reason or another. He also includes a list of "noteworthy answers" from various folks responding to the survey. His personal choice? Phalcon because of it's overall performance and the community around it.

So which framework seems most promising for 2014? Which should you switch to in the new year? Is it worth it? That's entirely up to you – as always, it depends on your comfort level, the project requirements, and time you have to study new things.

On PHPClasses.org today there's a new post from Manuel Lemos suggesting that one of the main reasons why PHP is popular is because of WordPress, not the frameworks that have been built with it.

Recently the Tiobe Index of published an update of their programming language index on which they claim PHP has been raising in popularity due to Zend Framework 2 but they do not justify why. Read this article to learn about an opinion why this claim is unfounded and PHP popularity has more to do with WordPress than with PHP at one language may be more popular than PHP Frameworks.

In the post he talks some about the TIOBE index, how it ranks popularity and where PHP currently sits on the list. He then lists out seven reasons why he thinks that WordPress made PHP as popular as it is including:

• WordPress is the Most Popular PHP Application
• WordPress alone is much more popular than any PHP framework
• The Extensible WordPress plugin ecosystem
• Non-Programmers develop in PHP just because of WordPress

He also suggests that the popularity of WordPress stems from it solving a more pragmatic problem than PHP frameworks

According to this new post on the Pixelstech site, PHP is "making a comeback" with an increase in popularity since it was last measured on the TIOBE index.

TIOBE released the programming language index for July 2013. The highlight of this month is that PHP is coming back. It ranks the fifth and has an increase of 1.54% compared to January. There are no changes in the ranking for the top 4 languages. The reason why PHP is back may be attributed to the new PHP Zend Framework that was released in September 2012, but this reason is not very convincing.

The post includes the list of the top twenty languages ordered by popularity with C, Java, Objective-C and C++ coming in at the four spots above PHP now.

Adam Culp has posted his own look at some of the PHP usage statistics that are out there and how they can be interpreted.

Every once in awhile I stumble across someone who is trying to find their way and decide what they will do in their career. As the organizer of a PHP user group I see many new developers passing through. Of course I always speak of how strong PHP is in the web markets, and encourage new web developers to pursue PHP as a tool in their box of goodies. Because as a web developer it would be a career limiting move to not have any knowledge of PHP. Here is why...

He shares a few different sources including w3tech's overall and PHP-specific information (PHP5 specific here) and the current results of the TIOBE index showing language popularity. For each he talks some about what the results mean (and don't mean) and how, if you're a "professional developer" you should, at the least, know PHP - the most dominant language in the web space.

On the ZFort Group's site today there's a new post sharing an infrographic about frameworks in PHP. The data was gathered from Google Trends and looks at popularity and provides some detail for each.

There is a great deal of frameworks, PHP ones in particular, fighting for developers attention. Zfort Group is an interested party in terms of choosing the best PHP frameworks for our custom PHP projects and internal ones as well. So we are continually investigating trends, developers' voting, forums, reviews, ratings, etc. We collected unique and very interesting information and it could be really helpful to the PHP community.

They pulled in some data from other sources as well. It's interesting to see which of the options came out highest in the numbers. They looked at trends for Yii, CodeIgniter, Zend Framework, CakePHP and Symfony. They detail some of the features of each framework including the required PHP version, complexity and quality of community/documentation.