I was reading the latest newsletter by Brent Roose, Developer Advocate for PHP at JetBrains, and I found myself disagreeing — out loud, apparently, because my 6-year-old looked over from her morning routine, unmoved, most likely because she is not a PHP developer. The premise is that PHP’s biggest problem is marketing, and that the PHP Foundation should be paying for a website redesign, a full-time docs hire, conference speakers, an omnichannel social media presence, internals blogging/vlogging, and “high-impact features” that can be marketed.
I have a ton of respect for Brent, have interacted with him on his streams, and he has done a ton for developers in the PHP world, so I want to be clear up front: I am not interested in dunking on him. I read most everything he writes and emphatically issue “+1″s in my head. I was (and am) genuinely interested in his projects such as Tempest, and I think his framing of the problem is at least worth taking seriously — even if I think he’s wrong about the answer.
But, I DO think he’s wrong, and pretty fundamentally so. Let’s take it point by point.
Re: paying a design agency to redesign php.net
Brent’s first suggestion is that php.net needs a proper design-agency-led redesign. I would push back on the premise harder than the suggestion, per se: I don’t actually think php.net looks dated, I think it looks timeless. I don’t think too many people coming to PHP from Node, Go, or Rust are bouncing because the homepage is too gray…er, purple. The Foundation just ran a paid design contest for the 8.5 release page in November, with $1,500+ in prizes. This shows the community is already interested in iterating on design, just incrementally and on volunteer-friendly terms instead of via an agency engagement.
The site is plain, yes. It’s fast. There’s no cookie banner, no AI-generated hero illustration, no parallax scroll, no autoplaying videos or GIFs, no sticky CTAs getting in the way. You land on it, find what you came for, and leave. It’s the opposite of sticky, like a quick-reference card instead of an audio-visual experience. In 2026, when seemingly EVERY. OTHER. SITE. has been redesigned by someone who clearly briefed an LLM to “make this look snazzy” resulting in it looking nearly identical to every other AI-built site (eugh)…I think php.net’s restraint is a feature, not a liability. Readability beats flashiness, especially for developer-facing resources.
Here’s a more direct counter-example, too: Some CakePHP Core folks (shout out to Kevin and Jos) just spent a few weeks migrating our entire docs ecosystem from RST to VitePress. The new sites look great, didn’t change navigation patterns (so we didn’t confuse our existing users), and we did the whole thing on volunteer time. No design agency required. If a small framework’s core team can pull off a tasteful refresh on weekends, the language itself doesn’t need to outsource its identity to a branding consultancy.
I’m not opposed to php.net evolving. I just don’t think hiring an agency is the move.
Re: paying someone full-time to work on the docs
This one is among the few of Brent’s points that confused me, because as far as I can tell, this is something the PHP Foundation already owns. Their team’s listed contributions explicitly include “writing documentation,” and as of their 2026 hiring round they fund eleven developers across the language.
If the argument is “the Foundation should hire more docs-writers”, then that’s totally reasonable to advocate for! But that’s a different argument than “pay someone to do this” because someone is ostensibly already being paid to do this. I have at least one friend in my circle who is a PHP docs contributor. Are they being paid? If not, why not? There should be ample funds available, because the Foundation has a transparent funding pipeline: sponsors include JetBrains, Automattic, Sovereign Tech Agency, Laravel, GoDaddy, Sentry, Symfony, Passbolt, and many others.
Sidebar: Brent works at JetBrains, which has been one of the Foundation’s largest sponsors since day one. I think there’s an interesting opportunity there for him to push from the inside.
The other thing that nagged at me reading this section was the underlying claim that people can’t actually learn PHP effectively from the current docs. I just don’t think that’s true. The PHP docs are great. They’re not a hand-holdy tutorial site, and they shouldn’t be, because excellent supplemental tutorial sites like Refactoring.Guru already exist for that purpose (I link this site to my team ALL the time). If anything, the docs could use a little more crosslinking to those resources. That’s a much smaller intervention than “hire a full-time writer.”
I also want to plug Tylae, an actual real-life PHP docs contributor I had the pleasure of meeting (virtually) recently. There are people doing this work now, on volunteer time, and I’d rather see Foundation resources go to people like them than to a brand-new contractor with no community context.
Re: paying conference speakers to speak outside the PHP bubble
This one I agree with, so I won’t dwell on it too much other than to say: I volunteer as tribute!! 😆
Cross-pollination between communities is one of the most underrated drivers of language adoption. I speak from personal experience. One of the best, most entertaining, most useful talks I ever sat through at a PHP conference was a Lemon Lemon talk about Progressive Web Apps – highly orthogonal to PHP, delivered to a room full of PHP devs. Nobody in the room cared the slides weren’t about PHP. The ideas were good, and the delivery was sharp. I went home and built and deployed a PWA, just for the fun of it! Imagine if the roles were reversed, and a JS or Rust dev went home and developed a quick CakePHP plugin or PHP Agent Skill. Amazing.
In an era where agents and MCP/A2A are taking the world by storm and everybody’s trying to figure out whether Node.js or Python is the best for LLM-enhancing scripts. Why not PHP, I ask you? Why not PHP?
So sure, fund some PHP folks to go talk at JSConf, GopherCon, RustConf, whatever. I’d genuinely watch a “PHP for Skeptics” talk show up in front of a Node audience.
Re: investing in social media everywhere
This one I have some thoughts on. Brent’s list of platforms PHP “should be everywhere” on includes X, Reddit, newsletters, blogs, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Notably absent…Mastodon. As in, phpc.social, the most popular PHP-flavored federated server that I know of, where a huge chunk of the post-Twitter-eXodus PHP community currently hangs out. I’m not sure if Brent is on Mastodon, I couldn’t find them with a quick search, but if you’re reading this Brent and no one has yet done so, please allow me to warmly extend the invite! We’d love to have you!! The more the merrier. The point is: the Fediverse is where a lot of the actual human-oriented conversation is happening right now, especially the conversation that developer advocates want to be a part of.
A few of the other platforms on the list just give me pause, and it could be because I’m an old-Internet denizen. X and Reddit are increasingly bot-saturated (“@grok is this true?” “@grok make a meme of this” smh.) and algorithmically hostile to non-engagement-bait content: PHP showing up there isn’t going to convert anyone, because (at least on my feed) it would appear between the “Anthropic just released the cheat code to using Claude to make ZILLIONS!” post and the flood of AI-generated fake imagery that makes me feel gross just scrolling past it. And what, exactly, would the PHP Foundation post on TikTok and Instagram? There are only so many cute pics of elePHPhants one can take. How about a short-form video of someone talking about their day as a core PHP developer? I just don’t think that one lands on anyone’s feed.
I’m not saying it can’t be done on these social media platforms, and again I’m quite skeptical and cynical towards most social media for technological news, but the lift seems too high to make it worth it. Newsletters and blogs are kind of the same thing, structurally, and I actually think Brent is doing a great job with these already.
What I’d actually advocate for…and this might just be a thinly-veiled “more of what already works” pitch…is leaning into the federated, blog-and-RSS, conference-and-podcast ecosystem that already exists. Because it does exist, and it’s good, and it doesn’t require anyone to make TikToks, and doesn’t require me to “like, comment, and subscribe” to anything.
Re: killing the mailing list and replacing it with vlogs
I was having this exact discussion with a coworker the other day, so my face went :O when I saw this show up in Brent’s newsletter. Internals being “inaccessible” because it’s on a mailing list is not really the problem, because most users don’t want to read the actual internals discussions. PHP is, deep down, very gnarly C code. Brain hurty, unless you live and breathe it. Most working PHP developers do not need or want to follow the day-to-day of zend_execute_data getting refactored.
What people do want is something like Anthropic’s Claude Code changelog: a curated, regular, technical-but-readable summary of what’s shipping, what’s in progress, and what’s coming. Bullet points, hints, with links to the deeper RFC discussions for people who want to go further. I would subscribe to that in a heartbeat. That’s the artifact I think is missing — not a vlog series, and specifically because…
Brent, you are doing this already, and doing it well. So is PHPUgly and PHP Architect. My friend John Congdon and his pals have been putting out quality, entertaining, perfect-vent-needed-for-a-weekday-afternoon podcast content for ages. Also, Roman Pronskiy is doing it on the Foundation side. Suggesting “someone should blog/vlog about PHP” without acknowledging the people currently doing this work read to me as inadvertently dismissive. But I’m hoping I misread it. There’s a thriving content layer around this language already. Maybe what’s missing isn’t more content, it’s better aggregation and discovery of the content that exists.
Re: investing in high-impact features and marketing them
My response to this is the same as to the docs point above, which is isn’t this what the Foundation is supposed to already be doing? Their funded developers ship features, fix bugs, and the Foundation publishes transparency reports periodically detailing all of it. If specific sponsors, and there are a lot of them, want particular high-impact features prioritized, then the channel for that conversation already exists. But if it’s not happening, then something is broken internally with the Foundation. If those conversations ARE happening and the rest of us aren’t hearing about them, that’s an information-flow problem, and it loops back into the “PHP Foundation Changelog” idea I floated above. That’s an intervention I’d actually advocate for.
From the outside looking in it seems like all the tools are in-place. Granted, the Foundation is less than 5 years old at this point, so you could attribute this breakdown to their relative infancy. But, I fervently hope this gets figured out soon, else it could cause some of those sponsors to pull their funds. The shininess of philanthropy does wear off eventually (see the “past sponsors” list on the PHP Foundation’s website).
OK, rant over. What am I actually arguing for?
When I lay these rebuttals out next to each other (and, thank you for sticking with me while I pontificate my thoughts point-by-point) I notice they all share a shape: most of Brent’s suggestions are framed as “PHP needs to buy these things,” and most of my responses are some flavor of “this is already happening, but you may not be looking in the right place.” That’s a big distinction. It’s the difference between:
- this language has a marketing problem and
- this language has a visibility into its own community problem.
If I had to name PHP’s biggest problem in one phrase, it wouldn’t be marketing. It would be fragmentation. Do the CakePHP developers know what the Laravel developers are doing? Do the xdebug developers know what the dd-trace-php developers are doing? And most importantly: do the people doing the work and the people consuming the language know about each other? The answer to that isn’t a JetBrains-scale marketing budget. It’s better aggregation, better cross-pollination, and more broadcasting of the volunteer and Foundation-level work that is already happening.
Brent is uniquely positioned to help with this, by the way. He works at one of the Foundation’s top sponsors. He has a massive audience, and he’s already running a top-tier blog that I am delighted to see show up in my inbox, and a YouTube channel about PHP that is quite successful. If he wants more of what he described, he is maybe one of ten people in the world that can make it happen: so make it happen. This is the principal reason I wanted to write an almost 2,000 word response to it (and, as you can probably tell by my grammar, I do not use AI to write my blog posts).
So, with respect and admiration, I disagree, Brent. PHP doesn’t have a marketing problem. It has a we should talk to each other more problem. And we’re already doing that, just not in the channels you may think.
Further Reading
- PHP’s biggest problem — Brent Roose, the original piece
- The PHP Foundation — official site
- PHP Foundation Impact and Transparency Report 2024
- phpc.social — where the federated PHP community lives
- php[architect] and php[ugly] — already doing the content work