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Comment by rs999gti | Hacker News Reader

Lots of stuff is PHP e.g. most message boards. It was very popular pre-dynamic web.

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.

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

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

Nextcloud, the mentioned Roundcube, plenty non-Wordpress CMSs, many internal tools I work with daily...

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.

I've never heard of RedFlagDeals. I have heard of Twitter.

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

Ewww... I remember having to work with that trash.

Ah the platform where exploits exploit themselves. It was so bug ridden.

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.

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!

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