In our previous blog, we wrote about Content Management Systems (CMS) and specifically about WordPress as a popular CMS. (https://neurobyte.in/wordpress-content-management-system-cms/). One of the great things about WordPress is that one can create a website without writing a single line of code. All that power comes with some limitations. You are still dependent on theme and plugin creators for customizations. As long as the customization of your interest is available in the theme or plugin marketplace you should be fine.  

What if you want to do a website customization that is unique to your business and there is no ready plugin or theme that offers such a customization? Then you will have to know a little bit about PHP because WordPress, themes and plugins all are created using PHP.  Thus knowing PHP or having a PHP expert in your team can thus let you take full control of your website and customize per your needs. One can even build a website exactly per one’s requirements from scratch in PHP.  
So let’s talk more about php. 

So what is PHP? 

PHP stands for Hypertext Pre-Processor. It’s an open-source, server-side, scripting language used to develop static and dynamic webpages and web applications. PHP has been widely ported and can be deployed on most web servers, on almost every server operating system and platform. 

Lets explain PHP server side scripting with an analogy. Consider a restaurant. Delivering an order to the end customer involves four key components here – a Dish (Food), a Waiter, a Chef and a kitchen. The Dish is a your website content, the customer reaches your site (restaurant) with the intent to consume content.  He looks around and clicks a button (order) and then waiter.(Domain) takes your order to the chef (PHP) about the order. The chef looks at the order picks up ingredients from the kitchen (Database such as MySQL) and returns a dish (content) as per the requirement.  So just like that a website offers up its menu of dishes (content) to the end users and PHP is busy preparing all that content to meet the order.  In a restaurant with the right ingredients there is no limit to the possible dishes that a chef may cook. In the same way with the right information a PHP programmer can get a website to do wonders.  
This analogy is perhaps an oversimplification of the complexity behind the scenes but I hope you get the idea. 

PHP is so popular as a programming language that many well known sites are built in PHP like WordPress, Facebook, Yahoo, Wikipedia etc. Further as per one report (https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language) PHP is used by around 79 % of the top websites around the world. There are several reasons why PHP is so popular. We try to offer up some of those reasons. 

Advantages Of PHP: 

• Open Source : PHP is open-source and free of cost, hence you can freely download, install and start developing using it. 

• Easy to Learn : It is simple to learn and mostly its learning curve is not long. The syntax is simple and flexible to use. 

• Ready libraries and Frameworks: Developing complex websites such as e-commerce requires a lot of work such as security, connectivity to database, ability set up complex data models, high performance, scale etc. The great thing with PHP is that it has a wide variety of battle tested libraries to choose from. That makes it easy and quick to develop these features.

• Large community: PHP has a massive community of experts and newbies alike. The community helps the new developers in learning the code and best practices. The community is responsible for many of the popular libraries. The documentation provided at the official sites helps in using the different features of PHP and its frameworks.   

• Compatibility with cloud services: Applications written in PHP are supported by all cloud providers (AWS, Google, Microsoft, GoDaddy). Our own cloud hosting services also offer PHP support (https://hosting.neurobyte.me/web-hosting/index.php). Thus, a PHP application can be deployed on any cloud provider and one can achieve excellent scalability and other benefits.

To Conclude –If you are a business owner or a senior leader in an organization, the PHP language stack is a must have in your organization’s software technology stack and if you are a programmer PHP is certainly one of the languages you want to add to your skills.