28 years of PHP (or is it 12?)

Over the past month or so I finally moved all my remaining Wordpress blogs to static content - the burden of maintaning Wordpress up to date and stressing out about calcified plugins from the early 2000s wasn’t worth it for sites where people don’t comment anymore and where 80% of the traffic is from bots - they don’t deserve a beautiful, painstakingly-generated-from-a-database dynamic page (nor do they deserve our new, even more beautiful, hand-crafted-css-rendered static pages, but hey - I’m not ready to drop off the face of the Internet yet).

As a result of this, I did a quick audit and found that I’m not really serving any dynamic content via PHP anymore. So I made the relatively easy choice to just disable the PHP plugin on my servers - this saves memory and resources for my web server and allows me to keep the memory fingerprint smaller.

A few days later it dawned on me - it’s the end of an era that lasted almost 3 decades by some inflated count, but at least, 12 years for sure.

I first started using PHP back in 1998 - PHP 3 was the new hotness and as we started exploring it, we marveled at the simplicity to run it (just plonk in an Apache module!), performance, and above all, ease of programming compared to what we were using then (mostly Perl in CGI mode - like troglodytes, we felt FastCGI was too complicated (look at us now, running nginx in front of a herd of gunicorns and other similar monstrosities). PHP gave us a very tight feedback loop and at the same tame a straightforward deployment strategy (what even is Docker? just FTP files into place, baby!) and I feel this was crucial to learn and practice web development in those early years.

We used PHP for everything from dynamic web pages, to a newspaper archival site (for Diario Monitor, now defunct), to our own internal enterprise management software (complete with invoice and cheque generator, this was absolutely glorious to use to create invoices), small interactive blogs (soon surpassed by Wordpress), a couple of PoS and accounting systems, and a Youtube clone for institutional videos at a university.

The Youtube clone was probably my last serious PHP project - developed around 2008-2010, by then I was already dabbling into Ruby on Rails. Indeed, that last PHP project had a baby ORM very similar to what I’d learned in Active Record for database querying. After I left that job in 2010, I really never touched PHP again for any production developments, having moved on to Ruby, then Python. I occassionally get to debug current PHP projects; PHP has, of course, evolved, and things like Laravel are stuff we only dreamed about back in the 1990s.

The only PHP things that survived and needed occasional updating were on my Wordpress blogs; Wordpress itself is kept up to date by its core team, but some plugins we use which hadn’t been maintained in years did need some changes to account for PHP deprecations and updates. That’s really the extent of any PHP manipulation I did between 2010 and 2025.

PHP is most certainly not dead and I’m not opposed to using it if work requires it - but until it does, I guess it’s prudent to say “see you later, old friend”.