Dries Buytaert, the founder and lead developer of Drupal says he has never regretted his decision of choosing PHP as the language for building Drupal as PHP is widely available at affordable cost. He adds that millions of individuals continuously tweak, update and rebuild their websites and scripting languages like PHP lend themselves to that.

Facts state that PHP is used by 81.7% of all websites and there are more than 5 million PHP developers around the world! Is that huge (!) or what?! Many online biggies out there are powered by PHP – Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter and Yahoo to name a few, thereby proving that PHP is highly scalable if good coding practices are followed.

Why PHP?

CMS Drupal has been written in PHP keeping in mind the simplicity and affordability of the scripting language. PHP is extensively accessible to amateurs and at the same time extremely efficient and loved by professional developers too. Almost every Internet Service Provider (ISP) supports PHP which makes it easier for your Drupal website to go live!

PHP has definitely evolved over the years. A lot of changes have been made over the years especially since version 5 making it more effective in writing fine code and using it in larger projects. The object-oriented model was also revamped after the 5th version and everything you need from object-oriented programming features are now available to use.

Drupal and PHP – In harmony with ‘Symfony’

Symfony is a PHP framework that’s a collection of reusable PHP components/libraries. Drupal 8 has incorporated several components/libraries of Symfony which has added tremendous value to CMS Drupal as a product and takes your Drupal website to another level.

It helps save Drupal developers or “Drupalists” (yes, you can call us that) from some problem-solving and maintenance time as you’re re-using the work done by a community of developers. Thus making your Drupal website more powerful while saving some development time.

Let’s just say Drupalists don’t really have to ‘re-invent the wheel’ all the time. Symfony offers ingenious tools for the most common and repetitive tasks that you use in every other Drupal website. Symfony shares some concepts of the Model, View and Controller (MVC) framework whose aim is to return a response in the most optimized way possible – also making it a Request/Response framework.

Symfony2 community is the most active and one of the biggest PHP communities and its components have been incorporated by many large open source projects like Drupal, phpBB, Joomla, Doctrine etc. Drupal wanted to incorporate Symfony because embracing Symfony would mean evolving with modern PHP together thereby benefiting from new PHP and Symfony improvements and standards.

PHP is an exceptionally efficient language that is used in huge projects and frameworks by both amateur and proficient developers all over the world. Its affordability and availably has made it extremely popular and is used by critical mass.