10 great applications built in PHP

PHP, one of the most commonly used server side scripting language and its different versions (3,4, 5 & 7) are used by 80% of all the websites in the world. Several high profile website are already using PHP, like Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr to name a few. And several new websites started using PHP recently. They are Washingtonpost.com, Nownew.com, Avgcom.

Let’s go through some of them:

1. Facebook

Facebook and PHP have a relation that dates back several years, and the company’s affinity toward this scripting language is not a secret. The company started using PHP in its infancy, and the relationship grew as the company grew bigger. However, to maintain the large code bases and to make development easy, PHP began to leverage Hack as well. This would support PHP’s strong points, while augmenting other areas through several new features.

2. Wikipedia

The basic technology structure of Wikipedia is LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and the website runs through a software known as MediaWiki, which is written in the PHP programming language. Most of the PHP code in MediaWiki makes use of HHVM JIT compiler, while the rest use Zend Engine PHP. MediaWiki is mainly used for projects maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia. It can also be used publicly in other wikis, and is even popular among smaller, non-Wikimedia wikis. By adding BlueSPce Media Wiki, you can extend the capabilities of MediaWiki in the realms of quality management, usability, administration, process support, editing and security. Semantic MediaWiki helps in storing and querying data within the wiki’s pages.

3. Yahoo

Yahoo uses PHP to come up with a search engine that has advanced search capabilities. The ideas to provide the best results for user queries , and developers build PHP functions that can return values.

4. AbsoluteWrite

AbsoluteWrite, a website, powered by WordPress, and written in PHP. It is a website for writers of all levels, something like a community of writers. The website offers articles and information on various topics including fiction, nonfiction and copywriting. The site is huge and provides links to a huge plethora of resources, apart from maintaining a growing online community of writers. PHP makes it clean, secure, easy with neatly structured codes that partly contributes to the success of the website.

5. Tumblr

Realising the benefits of PHP 7, Tumblr, a microblogging and social networking site that allows people to post short-form and multimedia content, recently upgraded to it. The website has more than 341 million blogs, blog posts, text, images, quotes, audio files, links, video and chat. So you can just about imagine how important it is to write the proper codes to ensure there is no vulnerability of security issues. They have added caching to the highly used codepaths, tested their new CDN configurations and upgraded underlying software. The shift from PHP 5 to PHP 7 was a breeze, and during the testing stage, the upgrade proved to be immensely successful.

6. Flickr

Flickr needs no particular introduction. It is an image and video hosting website where an active community uploads thousands of images every day. It’s got some advanced and powerful features that had made it so successful. It is the use of PHP scripts that had made the uploading of pictures to Flickr so easy. Searching for images within Flickr is also done through PHP, where the developers have done it by setting the API Key, so the user will type the keywords and the results will be generated within the tag parameter. If the user wants to see the full contents of a search results, the response will have to structured to generate them. Security is a major concern in websites like Flickr, but when you are using PHP, you don’t have to worry about it.

7. iStock photo

iStock photo is a huge an online microctock photography community where you get royalty-free images. In fact, millions of photos, clip art, auto and video tracks and illustrations. Half a million of them are added each month. iStock photo is a shopping cart that has to be maintained with a great deal of security and care and this is done through PHP. For every iStockphoto of Getty images media file, there is a script with an individual SEO friendly page. So you can just about imagine how huge a database the site has to maintain.

8. WordPress

Wordpress doesn’t need a particular introduction because it is something almost everyone uses or has used in the world of internet. Just the basic syntax of PHP along with HTML and CSS is used to develop WordPress themes, plugins, modify default behaviour through filters and actions. PHP does all the processing, starting from what to grab from the database, the files that should be loaded fetching post metadata, calling the theme, calling plugins, checking options, process form fields, image and document uploads and so on. WordPress uses PHP to bring out the webpage to the browser.

9. SourceForge

SourceForge isn’t an alien concept to developers because it offers them a centralised online platform to control and manage free, open source software projects. The whole online community is maintained through PHP, apart from Apache web server, Ruby, Python, Perl and Tcl. The third party applications in the website requires sessions support. Apart from processing the codes, and generating the HTML that will be based to the client on the other side, sessions are usually implemented in the PHP to track authentication information and basic preferences when they browse the website.

10. Digg

Digg is a very popular name in the online and social media marketing. It was initially a social bookmarking website, but is now better known as a user driven social content website, powered brilliantly by the PHP technology. The scalability and performance are amazing, thanks to PHP. Its technology stack, LAMP that contributes to the speedy performance of this news aggregation site.

Closing Thoughts

In order to understand which language you should be using in the real world, go through the CRUD analysis. CRUD is the acronym for Create, Read, Update & Delete. Many websites use this analysis before deciding which language to use. Facebook is one. CRUD is so very important when you are creating a content based application. PHP can be used across all major operating systems & web servers, and supports platforms like Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.

10 great applications built in PHP