PHP devs hate to admit that the only reason PHP is still relevant at all today is because of WordPress.
If WordPress moved to a modern language tomorrow, PHP would cease to exist afterwards.
If WordPress moved to a modern language tomorrow, PHP would cease to exist afterwards.
But there's also Typo3, Spryker, Magento, Drupal, Shopware, Sylius.
I won't touch Wordpress. I worked with it about 15 years ago for a few years, but didn't touch it afterwards.
And moving WP to a 'modern' language (whatever that modern means) is not something possible. ~60,000 plugins, similar number of themes, 30% of all ecommerce websites, billions of dollars of businesses with dependencies ride on it.
> Right now, WordPress only has beta support for PHP 8.0. Now, to be clear: PHP 8.0 was released in 2020, and is now end of life, three years later — and WordPress doesn't yet support it…
There are dozens of alternatives better than WordPress, if upgrading it meant a complete tooling change I think many would take the opportunity to replatform to something else. The only thing WP really has over them is it's expansive plugin library, and buy in from clients.
But it's not really up to devs. I don't think many devs believe it's the best system, but it is desired by clients very often.
The expansive plugin library that WP has is due to its ease of use, stability and the extent it goes to acommodate users, developers and businesses at the same time. Its no small factor, its no small feat.
Craft, Kirby, Twill, October, Grav, Statamic, Bolt, Processwire… All of those projects have big active ecosystems around them and are used for serious projects. Most other languages dont have a single CMS. There is no CMS in Go or Elixir. Javascript have some but they are super immature and mostly hype. Python has some super ugly ones based around Django.
Now people may look down on these PHP cmses but many web projects like ecommerce grow as extensions of CMS. And most of these CMSes are suited to this because they are nice web framework with customizable admin area. So it often doesnt make sense not use PHP.