In short, the community loves PHP and believes in the Foundation's role, but is asking us to be clearer, more visible, and more coordinated in addressing existing and future challenges. The 2026 strategy answers those concerns through four themes:

1. Repositioning PHP: close the gap between today's PHP and the outdated perception that still shapes hiring and tech-stack decisions.
2. Initiatives with Community as Partners: scale our impact through six Special Interest Groups that address documented gaps.
3. Visibility & Voice of the Foundation: consistently surface priorities, work, and impact to the community, sponsors, and the Board.
4. Language Stewardship: support the technical work that already happens around PHP core and the RFC process while staying clear about the Foundation's role as facilitator and resource, not the driver of decisions.

Through our 2025 work, and in addition to addressing community feedback, the Foundation set goals for 2026, which are also baked into this strategy.

By the end of 2026, success looks like: a regular communication cadence for increased transparency; six operational Special Interest Groups with active community engagement and clear goals; a more diversified sponsor base and a clear, repeatable story about modern PHP that the community can carry into rooms where decisions get made.

Strategic Themes for 2026

Four themes organize the 2026 plan. Each maps directly to a category of community feedback and 2026 goals. Together, they answer the dominant request from the listening tour: be more visible, more coordinated, and more clearly responsive to what the community has told us.

Theme 1: Repositioning PHP

The PHP that people remember is not the PHP that exists today. Closing that gap is a multi-year effort. 2026 lays the groundwork: a coordinated voice, better assets for advocacy, and new platforms to tell the story of PHP at scale.

Initiatives

• Foundation-hosted podcast. A Foundation-hosted series surfacing the companies and engineering teams running modern PHP at scale. The target audience is decision-makers and engineers outside the PHP bubble.
• PHP Ambassador Program. Brings together interested speakers; provides “State of Modern PHP” storytelling assets and CfP coordination that turn individual advocacy into a coordinated effort. More below.

Theme 2: Initiatives with Community as Partners

The Foundation has limited staff and limited budget, but the community has enormous capacity for making change. In 2026 we will create six structured Special Interest Groups that give community members multiple ways to contribute and focus their energy on the challenges that currently exist for the PHP ecosystem.

Initiatives

• Launch six Special Interest Groups. Build infrastructure to include interested community members in facing challenges across the ecosystem and from a variety of lenses. Details of these groups are below.

Theme 3: Visibility & Voice of the Foundation

The PHP Foundation and Board will regularly articulate what they are doing and why, and they will be consistently accessible and engaged with the PHP community.

Initiatives

• Communication plan. Build a quarterly reporting cadence with a focus on bugs and issues we are prioritizing; revive the newsletter; publish Board minutes in a public repository.
• Community engagement. Continue connection through community Discord channels; build a system to promote events where contractors and Board members will be; launch monthly Office Hours/Interviews with contractors/Board members.
• Website clarity. Publish a clear articulation of Foundation priorities, the distribution of work across contractors, and the Foundation's role relative to the language and the community.

Theme 4: Language Stewardship

This category contains the work the Foundation contributes to but does not own. The PHP codebase and the future of the language belong to the community. The Foundation's role is to support, facilitate, and convene, not to direct. In 2026, we will be explicit about that role and we will invest where the Foundation can meaningfully help.

Initiatives

• Contributor responsiveness and communication. Foundation contractors continue to lead in PR review and merge throughput; we will publish quarterly numbers so the community can see progress made by the team.
• PHP core documentation. Identify and fund a focused effort to refresh the internals book and contributor onboarding documentation, in coordination with internals maintainers. Create a more maintainable system for keeping documentation up to date, moving forward.
• PHP Security. The Alpha-Omega grant will position the Foundation at the center of a coordinated effort to improve security practices and procedures and fix security vulnerabilities across the PHP ecosystem.

Community Special Interest Groups

The PHP Foundation will launch six community special interest groups, with staggered launches from May through September. Each addresses one or more documented gaps from the listening tour, and each includes participation from the community, along with Foundation staff support. These are meant to be collaborative efforts with existing groups and individuals who have already spent time and energy addressing these topics.

At a Glance:

About the Special Interest Groups:

1. Ecosystem Security Team

Purpose: Improves security of the PHP ecosystem and helps maintainers as AI-assisted vulnerability research becomes more common. Proactively identifies vulnerabilities and triages vulnerability reports. Builds tooling to assess, classify, and address security issues. Assists maintainers in scanning projects and acts as a trusted resource to monitor and support them in critical scenarios. Note: The Team has already launched *. They have connected with 30 organizations and projects so far and performed over a thousand scans and affected changes in hundreds of repos. If you’re interested in a scan, or have questions for the team, get in touch!*

Success in 2026: Documentation for maintainers on available tooling, best practices and report triage; sustainability plan for continuing the work at the end of the grant; 1000+ projects scanned across the PHP ecosystem.

2. PHP Ambassador Program

Purpose: Advocacy for PHP outside the PHP ecosystem. Provides resources for people who want to give talks at open-source conferences and other open-source events; shares CfPs and maintains a calendar of conferences outside the PHP world; develops shared talk assets and messaging, including a maintained "State of Modern PHP" deck.

Success in 2026: at least 3 talks delivered by ambassadors at non-PHP open-source venues; a shared CfP calendar in active use; at least 10 participating community members; regular cadence of virtual gatherings of participants established.

3. PHP Onboarding Initiative

Purpose: Improves the experience of new users from first encounter through first deployment. Identifies setup pain points; coordinates education and learning resources; explores a structured mentorship program; documents a clear onboarding path that newcomers can follow; works with the php.net website team to improve documentation and experience.

Success in 2026: a published "getting started with PHP" path replacing the scattered resources currently in existence; a mentorship pilot with at least 5 mentor/mentee pairs; documented setup-time benchmarks against which 2027 progress can be measured; monthly virtual gatherings of participants established.

4. Cryptography Special Interest Group

Purpose: Provides a venue for Post-Quantum Cryptography discussions, and moves The PHP Foundation into a more active role in the PHP ecosystem's response; maps where cryptography exists across both PHP core and the wider ecosystem; tracks upstream developments in OpenSSL and libsodium; also provides a venue for related conversations and initiatives that may arise.

Success in 2026: a published "clear public readiness roadmap" that regulators, enterprise adopters, and the broader community can reference. Regular cadence of meetings is established.

5. Community Events Coalition

Purpose: Brings together user group leaders and conference organizers. Maintains a shared speaker pool; shares venue, sponsor, and operations resources; restores and maintains the PHP user group directory; helps promote new CfPs and new events; surfaces contribution opportunities for those looking to volunteer.

Success in 2026: the user group directory is current and active; at least one shared resource bundle (speaker pool, sponsor decks, venue tips) is in circulation; monthly virtual gatherings of organizers established.

6. PHP Accessibility & Inclusion Special Interest Group

Purpose: Works to make the language, its documentation, and its learning resources more accessible to a wider range of people across abilities, geographies, languages, and career stages. Supports community leaders and maintainers in building healthy, inclusive communities, including helping draft codes of conduct, and providing peer support for CoC report responses.

This group intentionally launches later, after the Foundation has demonstrated it can successfully implement and facilitate community-based Special Interest Groups. Sequencing should not be read as deprioritization: an interim advisory group will be convened in July-August to prepare the SIG’s goals and ensure that inclusion principles are baked into the charters of the earlier-launching groups.

Success in 2026: SIG is operational with an active roster and well-articulated goals; a shared code-of-conduct template and response plan for projects to use; an accessibility audit of the primary PHP web properties planned for implementation in 2027.

Fundraising & Sustainability

Fundraising is the single most consequential operational priority in 2026. The 2025 reserve drawdown is sustainable for now, but a multi-year drawdown would erode the Foundation's ability to maintain technical headcount. So although this was a measured and deliberate strategy, we are actively working to minimize the drawdown in 2026.

2026 Priorities

• Sponsor research. Structured conversations with current and prospective sponsors in or before Q3 to understand what they value, what benefits would matter, and where the Foundation's value proposition is unclear.
• Refreshed tiers and benefits, if needed. New or revised sponsorship tiers informed by the research, with clearer benefits and clearer reporting back to sponsors.
• Fundraising Initiative. A fundraising initiative that is already in discussion will be launched. Target net contribution: $40,000.
• Cross-ecosystem fundraising conversation. Active presence in the conversations that other foundations and policy bodies are having about open-source funding sustainability. PHP is not the only ecosystem facing harder fundraising; visibility in that conversation builds relationships and protects the Foundation's position.
• Advisory Board engagement. Quarterly Advisory Board meetings, increased activity in internal channels, stronger collaboration on perception of PHP, storytelling, and technical strategy.

2026 Financial Targets

• Total raised irrespective of grants: $700,000+ (versus $625,000 in 2025)
• Open Collective active contributors: 600+ (versus 536 in 2025)
• Top-10 sponsor concentration: reduced from ~51% to <45% of revenue
• At least 15 new Silver or higher level sponsors
• Reserve drawdown halted or materially reduced by Q1 2027
• Grant applications for 2027 where applicable

2026 Timeline for Implementation

The timeline below includes high-level initiatives, but it should be noted that there will be many other smaller efforts along the way, driven by standard Foundation operations, individual goals of the community groups, and unforeseen developments and opportunities that emerge throughout the year. This is not a comprehensive list of everything the Foundation will do in 2026.

Q2 2026

Q3 2026

Q4 2026

Risks & Mitigations

Ongoing Operations

Alongside the strategic initiatives above, the Foundation maintains an annual operating rhythm. These activities are not part of the 2026 strategic story but are essential to the Foundation's stability and to the community's experience of working with us.

• Contractor applications and renewals. Annual review of existing contracts and evaluation of new applications. The 2026 round will be informed by the results of our findings— particularly contributor responsiveness, internals documentation, and ecosystem technical leadership. Renewal decisions intersect directly with the 2026 fundraising targets and the reserve picture, so this cycle is tracked alongside the financial plan.
• Community survey partnership. The Foundation continues to partner on the running of community surveys. These provide quantitative signals that complement the qualitative listening tour and give us year-over-year measurement of the community's experience. Findings inform both the next year's strategy and public reporting.
• End-of-year fundraising drive. The annual November/December campaign anchors the Open Collective contributor count and is the moment when the broadest swath of the community contributes. The 2026 campaign will lean into the year's narrative— listening tour, Special Interest Groups, and technical impact— to make the case for the Foundation as clearly as possible. There is also a potential to tap into the 5th anniversary of the Foundation itself.
• Board minutes publication. Board minutes are published on an ongoing basis as part of the Foundation's governance transparency. This practice continues in 2026 alongside the broader push to make Foundation operations more legible to the community.
• Monthly expense and contribution tracking. Monthly tracking and reporting of expenses and Open Collective contributions provides the public financial baseline.

Gathering More Data

It should be noted that these strategies and ideas are based on the initial findings, and it would be wise to gather even more data that will inform future decisions and plans. We have recently launched a State of PHP Survey in partnership with PhpStorm from JetBrains, and will be releasing the results later in the year. We will also be open to coordinating future surveys and means of data collection.

Getting Involved

If you're interested in joining or learning more about a Special Interest Group, the best place to start is by letting us know through this general interest form. We'll also be sharing more details about each group through our newsletter and social media accounts as they launch.

We also want to encourage you to complete the survey as it will be helpful for the entire community to have more insight into how PHP is being used. Please go take the State of PHP Survey.

Lastly, as you know, none of this work is possible without the financial generosity of our community. We are incredibly grateful for all our individual and organizational supporters. If you would like to support The PHP Foundation's mission, please see our Open Collectives:

• To donate in USD: https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation
• To donate in EUR: https://opencollective.com/php-foundation-eur

Whether you're an individual developer, a company that runs PHP, a community organizer, or other type of PHP community member, we would love to include you on this journey. PHP thrives when we all take part!

This survey is an effort to build a clearer picture of how PHP is used today: who is using it, which tools and frameworks developers rely on, what challenges they face, how they feel about the language, and where they see PHP going next.

We invite everyone who works with PHP to participate.

Why we're launching the State of PHP survey

PHP has been around for more than 30 years, and it continues to evolve alongside the people and organizations that depend on it. The ecosystem is broad: developers use PHP across many countries, industries, experience levels, frameworks, deployment environments, and workflows. To support PHP effectively, we need better insight into that ecosystem. The goal is to gather representative input from PHP developers of all backgrounds. Whether you have been writing PHP for decades or only recently started, your perspective is invaluable.

What happens with the results

The aggregated results will be published in the State of PHP 2026 report later this year, which will be announced in The PHP Foundation and PhpStorm’s social media channels and newsletters.

The report will help the community better understand current PHP usage and trends. It will also provide useful insight for contributors, maintainers, tool authors, educators, companies, and everyone working to strengthen PHP and its ecosystem.

Take the survey

We encourage all PHP developers to take part and to share the survey with colleagues and local PHP communities.

Take the Survey

The more developers participate, the more useful and representative the final report will be.

Thank you for helping us map the PHP ecosystem and for being part of the first State of PHP survey.

-- The PHP Foundation and PhpStorm teams

Elizabeth Barron, The PHP Foundation’s Executive Director, is joining the lineup of JetBrains PHPverse 2026 speakers with a keynote talk “Getting to Know The PHP Foundation”. Tune in on June 9 to learn what The PHP Foundation actually does, which initiatives are planned for the rest of 2026, and how the community can help support the PHP ecosystem.

About JetBrains PHPverse

JetBrains PHPverse is a free online conference and community event bringing together the big and vibrant PHP herd. It was first held in 2025, reaching out to more than 55,000 developers worldwide.

Besides The PHP Foundation’s keynote, expect a curated lineup of talks from some of the most influential voices in the PHP ecosystem, covering the major PHP frameworks, tools, and shipping PHP code with AI:

• Fabien Potencier, Founder of Symfony
• Jeffrey Way, Founder of Laracasts
• Larry Garfield, Functional Programming Enthusiast
• Jonathan Bossenger, Developer Advocate at Automattic
• Nils Adermann, Co-Founder of Packagist
• Ashley Hindle, Founder and CEO of Fuel

The conversations and deep dives are hosted by Nuno Maduro, creator of Pest, Larastan, and Laravel Pint, and Brent Roose, Developer Advocate for PHP at JetBrains.

Join the conversation

For The PHP Foundation, JetBrains PHPverse is not just a talking stage, but a chance to engage in a conversation with thousands of engineers who use PHP every day.

We invite every member of the PHP community to join us for this day of learning and connection. Whether you’re interested in the latest RFCs, projects supported by the Foundation, or what’s next for tools you are using, there is something at PHPverse for everyone.

Register for JetBrains PHPverse 2026

We also encourage you to join the official Discord server to ask questions and engage with the speakers and fellow developers.

Looking forward to seeing you on June 9!

PHP turned 30 in 2025. With The PHP Foundation's support, the PHP project marked the year by shipping PHP 8.5. The PHP Foundation also launched PIE 1.0, initiated a project to modernize PHP's stream layer, and authored roughly 42% of all commits to PHP's core. This work was supported by 536 sponsors and individual contributors, and it could not have happened without them.

At the end of 2025, The PHP Foundation consisted of 8 volunteer board members, an Executive Director sponsored by JetBrains, and 11 contracted developers who worked part- and full-time to strengthen and improve the core PHP language through bug and security fixes, feature development, and contributing to the RFC process through discussion and development of new RFCs.

The total contributions received from sponsors and individual donors was $730,534, which enabled The PHP Foundation to advance its mission in a meaningful way.

About the PHP Foundation

The PHP Foundation's main focus is to ensure the sustainability and long term viability of the PHP language. Our priorities continue to be:

• Improving the language for users
• Providing high-quality maintenance
• Improving the project to retain current contributors and integrate new ones
• Promoting the public image of PHP

It should be noted that The PHP Foundation does not control the decisions made by the PHP community regarding the language, nor does it assume any governance over the language itself. PHP has always been, and will continue to be a community-owned Open Source project.

What we shipped in 2025

Leadership at The PHP Foundation coordinated several high-level initiatives, including:

• The completion of a Security Audit by Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF), funded by the Sovereign Tech Agency through the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), and sustained security advisory work across the team
• The addition of FrankenPHP to the PHP GitHub organization, in collaboration with Les-Tilleuls.coop
• The development of the official PHP SDK for MCP, in collaboration with the Symfony Team and Anthropic

In addition, in 2025, eleven Foundation-funded contractors collectively logged thousands of hours advancing PHP's language, runtime, security posture, ecosystem tooling, and community reach.

Key achievements included:

• Successful delivery of PHP 8.5
• Launch of PIE 1.0 and initiation of the formal PECL deprecation process
• Launch of the STF Streams modernization project
• PHP Foundation representation at the Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group on the EU Cyber Resilience Act

The PHP Foundation Staff

Our 2025 team was stable and productive, and worked very well together. We ended 2025 by adding one more contractor to the team in H2: Joe Watkins.

Therefore, as of January 1, 2026, 11 Foundation developers work on PHP:

• Arnaud Le Blanc @arnaud-lb
• David Carlier @devnexen
• Derick Rethans @derickr
• Gina P. Banyard @Girgias
• Ilija Tovilo @iluuu1994
• Jakub Zelenka @bukka
• James Titcumb @asgrim
• Joe Watkins @krakjoe
• Máté Kocsis @kocsismate
• Saki Takamachi @SakiTakamachi
• Shivam Mathur @shivammathur

Team Achievements

We acknowledge the limitations in providing any metrics; very rarely do metrics accurately represent the full scenario (for instance, a 1-line commit and a 100-line commit are counted equally in the overall number of commits). Additionally, some metrics are more difficult to capture than others. Therefore, we offer this set of obtainable metrics to collectively demonstrate the team's impact. To clarify the data points above:

• PRs merged = PRs that were authored by a contractor that were merged by anyone
• Community PR Reviews = PRs from other people that were reviewed/commented on by contractors
• % of Bug Fixes = the percent of all bug fix PRs that were authored by a contractor but merged by anyone in the community. PRs were considered “fixes” if they included the words “fix,” “resolve,” or “bug” in the title of the PR

Language & runtime

• URL/URI parsing RFC (Máté Kocsis) passed in May, representing PHP's most significant standard-library addition in years, including upstream contributions to the uriparser C library.
• Gina P. Banyard drove the entire PHP 8.5 deprecations and warnings RFC to php-src and authored 173 merged PRs (roughly 16% of all merged PRs to php-src in 2025).
• Arnaud Le Blanc's Tail Call VM technique merged in August, removing PHP's dependency on a single compiler for peak performance; he also co-developed Partial Function Applications v2 and Context Managers with Larry Garfield.
• Ilija Tovilo was the team's leading committer to php-src (565 commits) and advanced the Pattern Matching RFC alongside deep performance work on zend_op size and TMP|VAR consolidation.
• Saki Takamachi delivered BCMath optimizations and created xsse, a portable SIMD abstraction library already in use in php-src.
• Jakub Zelenka progressed with implementation of JsonSchema support for the JSON extension.

Security

Jakub Zelenka led sustained multi-month investigations on multiple security advisories, which included the handling of PHP security releases. Jakub also represented the PHP Foundation in the Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group shaping EU Cyber Resilience Act compliance. David Carlier delivered a steady stream of overflow, double-free, and memory leak fixes across GD, ZIP, intl, PDO_SQLite, sodium, and Fiber, upstreaming several directly to libgd. Shivam Mathur is responsible for security upgrades to Windows PHP builds addressing 50+ CVEs/security issues, and continues to support builds for 100+ extensions for Windows. Derick Rethans patched an XSS in php.net and ran an emergency CVE response for the rsync server.

Streams modernization (Sovereign Tech Fund)

The STF underwrote a 530-hour modernization of PHP's stream layer, delivering a new Polling API, TLS 1.3 improvements with session resumption (PSK, tickets, early data), redesigned stream error handling, an io_uring/IOCP abstraction, modernized copy infrastructure (copy_file_range, splice, sendfile), filter seeking improvements, and socket option enhancements. This is an ongoing project and will see more progress in 2026.

Ecosystem & infrastructure

The PHP Foundation has demonstrated meaningful contributions in several areas:

• PIE (the new PHP extension installer): James Titcumb authored 482 of 537 commits to php/pie (roughly 90% of the codebase) and 109 of 156 merged PRs. He shipped 14 PIE releases including 1.0 in June, formally initiated PECL's deprecation, and delivered five conference talks evangelizing the project.
• Windows infrastructure: Shivam Mathur authored 95% of commits to php/php-windows-builder and 98% of commits to php/web-downloads. Without his work, PHP would have no Windows distribution maintainer.
• French documentation: 38% of commits and 47% of merged PRs to php/doc-fr in 2025 came from David Carlier, a community-facing impact that is often invisible in English-language reporting but reaches Francophone PHP developers worldwide.
• Infrastructure: Derick Rethans migrated nearly every php.net property (wiki, downloads, qa, pecl, bugs, docs, www, and more) to modern Ansible-managed infrastructure, expanded WebAssembly support for interactive examples in the manual, and contributed alongside Shivam and Roman on the redesigned downloads page. Máté Kocsis and Ilija built statistical benchmarking infrastructure (Welch T-Test, Wilcoxon, Valgrind, variance reduction) underpinning the team's performance work.

Strategic R&D

Joe Watkins joined in H2 and published ORT, a PHP tensor library with backends for SSE2/SSE4.1/AVX2/AVX512, NEON, CUDA, RISC-V64, and WebAssembly (including a custom IEEE 754-2008 float16 implementation in C) reaching 97% test coverage and positioning PHP to participate in AI/ML workloads. Arnaud explored generational and Boehm GC, plus Modules and Snapshots PoCs.

Maintenance & stewardship

Beyond headline projects, the team spent a large percentage of their time carrying PHP's day-to-day weight: continuous bug triage (Ilija's largest recurring line item every month), monthly release management across 8.3.x and 8.4.x, cross-platform fixes spanning Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Haiku, French (David) and Japanese (Saki) documentation contributions, mailing list moderation, and dozens of code reviews monthly across virtually every PHP subsystem. Additionally, the team spent time on maintenance and stable releases of external extensions including imagick and GnuPG, and tools like PHP-FPM that are part of PHP core.

RFCs

The following list covers RFCs authored or co-authored by PHP Foundation contractors in 2025, along with their RFCs that changed status in 2025.

*This person was not a contractor for The PHP Foundation at time of authorship, but is acknowledged here for their contribution to the RFC

The PHP Foundation Sponsors

Our sponsors and individual contributors are the lifeblood of The PHP Foundation, for without their continued support, we would not be able to continue making meaningful contributions and improvements to the PHP language.

Our highest level sponsors for 2025 were Sovereign Tech Agency, JetBrains, Automattic, GoDaddy.com, Passbolt, Sentry, Les-Tilleuls.coop, Craft CMS, Private Packagist, Cybozu, Tideways, Manychat, Zend by Perforce, CH Studio, and Aternos GmbH.

Overall, 536 organizations and individuals sponsored The PHP Foundation in 2025, which is substantially less than the previous year. This is an indication of an increasingly challenging fundraising space in the open source ecosystem, a reality our peers at other Foundations and Open Source projects are also navigating.

We are incredibly grateful for all those who have financially supported and continue to support The PHP Foundation.

The PHP Foundation Financial Report

In 2025, The PHP Foundation was financially backed by organizations and individuals with the goal of paying a competitive salary to as many core developers as possible. These numbers represent figures in USD.

*Fees include a 10% Open Source Collective fiscal host fee (dealing with contracts, expense reviews and payments, bank account management, official registrations and dealing with government requirements, open collective platform development etc), and 1-5% percent of payment processing fees, depending on the payment method used.

**Starting in 2025, some funds were donated and paid in Euro; please allow for small rounding variance due to conversion rates.

All incoming and outgoing transactions of The PHP Foundation are publicly available to view for anyone: https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation#category-BUDGET

The PHP Foundation Brand & Public Channels

The PHP Foundation represents a community of core PHP developers and advocates for the PHP programming language. The PHP Foundation used the channels listed below for public communication:

• 24.8K LinkedIn page followers: https://www.linkedin.com/company/phpfoundation
• 13.7K X followers: https://x.com/thephpf
• 1.2K Mastodon followers: https://phpc.social/@thephpf
• 1.2K Bluesky followers: https://bsky.app/profile/thephpf.bsky.social
• 3390 Subscribers to The PHP Foundation Newsletter

We will continue to grow our social media presence as a means of connecting with the broader PHP community.

Looking Back: Goals for 2025

In the previous report, we outlined a few organizational and technical goals. Let's take a look at how we did.

Organization Goals

• Secure funding to support core development and marketing initiatives. ✅

  The PHP Foundation received funds as noted above to continue our focus on core development and the marketing of PHP and The PHP Foundation.

• Launch the "PHP 30" anniversary campaign in collaboration with JetBrains. ✅

  The PHP Foundation celebrated 30 years of PHP at the PHPverse conference hosted by JetBrains.

• Consolidate and grow social media presence across multiple platforms. ✅

  The reach and engagement for our social media accounts grew in every platform.

• Increase website traffic through improved documentation and resources. ❓

  We only added tracking to the php.net website toward the end of 2024, so we did not have a baseline for comparison. This is something we can measure moving forward.

• Develop an Ambassador Program. ❌

  This was discussed, but not launched. Look for a version of this in 2026.

• Begin preparation for the "PHP Next" marketing campaign to highlight PHP's modernization. ❌

  This was discussed, but not launched. Look for a version of this in 2026.

• Modernize PHP's website with updated downloads page, documentation, and homepage. ⚠️ Partial

  This was partially completed and included a redesigned page for the 8.5 release and a clearer and more functional Downloads page. There is still work to be done on the homepage and in the documentation.

Technical Goals

• Continue on-going maintenance and development of the PHP core. ✅

  As demonstrated in this report, our contractors continue to focus on improving the PHP core.

• Establish a working group for integrating modern HTTP server capabilities into PHP core. ✅

  Instead, the PHP project incorporated the FrankenPHP project into its GitHub organization, offering a modern solution to running PHP in an HTTP server. This change was initiated by engineers at Les-Tilleuls.coop, and implemented in partnership with the PHP Foundation.

• Address key developer experience pain points, particularly for first-time users. ⚠️ Partial

  This was partially completed with the improvements on the Downloads page, but there is still much work and research to be done here.

Looking Ahead: Goals for 2026

2026 brings its own challenges but we are committed to continuing to make a measurable difference in the PHP language and ecosystem.

Organization Goals

• Complete the executive transition initiated in Q4 2025
• Complete the onboarding of a Director of Fundraising
• Expand support for the PHP Ecosystem
• Improve Foundation communication, transparency, and internal documentation
• Build a plan to improve public perception of PHP
• Balance spending with funding and creating a systematic approach to fundraising

Technical Goals

• Create Cryptography working group
• Explore support for continued security-focused work

Budget plan for 2026

Total expenses exceeded total received donations by approximately $139,000 in 2025, which was a deliberate choice to maintain investment in technical headcount while we strengthen relationships with sponsors and individual contributors. The PHP Foundation remains financially solvent with healthy reserves, and reducing this gap is a 2026 priority.

We will also continue to utilize Open Collective as our fiscal host, as they provide transparency and a suite of valuable financial services for The PHP Foundation.

Outro

The work in this report is the runway for what's next. We head into 2026 with real momentum and a clear sense of what the community has asked of us. None of the technical leadership, the security work, the new partnerships ahead, and the support for the PHP ecosystem happens without the people who fund us. With your help, together we can keep PHP thriving in a changing open source world.

In March, the Linux Foundation announced a grant with the goal of strengthening the security of the open source software ecosystem. This funding is managed by Alpha-Omega and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF).

We're delighted to announce the PHP Foundation has been awarded a grant from Alpha-Omega to help improve the security of the PHP open source ecosystem.

PHP is foundational to the modern web, and ensuring its security is essential for a significant portion of the web's functionality and integrity.

New security tools making use of AI are accelerating the discovery of vulnerabilities in open source software. Initiatives like Project Glasswing are attempting to prepare software for the increasing accessibility of such tooling to bad actors. A number of large PHP projects have already received and acted on credible audit reports and concrete issues found by these new tools.

At the same time, many projects have been reporting a drastic increase in the volume of vulnerability reports they have to deal with, many bearing the hallmarks of lazy AI generation. These low-quality reports waste maintainers' time and overshadow legitimate issues.

The PHP Foundation is creating a PHP Ecosystem Security Team to help our ecosystem maintainers with these new challenges. This new PHP Foundation team will help triage vulnerability reports and disclose them responsibly as necessary. It will work on tooling to discover, classify and remediate security vulnerabilities and share emerging techniques on using them effectively and help the PHP ecosystem adopt these tools. The team will respect maintainer bandwidth, provide high-quality reports, coordinate project access to new security tooling, support projects with only a few maintainers, and find solutions for projects with no active maintainers at all.

We're excited our friends at the Drupal Association were awarded a similar grant from Alpha-Omega to secure the Drupal ecosystem built on top of PHP. The PHP Foundation is looking forward to collaborating with the Drupal Security Team on shared approaches and we hope to be joined by more experts from individual PHP projects and subcommunities as we build out the new team.

The PHP Foundation grant will fund a six-month full-time position titled "Ecosystem AI Security Engineer in Residence at the PHP Foundation" to lead this effort and to prepare a sustainability plan for the time after this initial phase. This person will act as a trusted intermediary between security researchers and maintainers in urgent, high-risk situations, and will collaborate with peers in similar roles across other language ecosystems. Additionally, grant funding will also be employed toward the team goals described above where they cannot be accomplished by the single paid lead position or with the help of PHP community volunteers.

After many conversations with community leaders in the PHP ecosystem, known security experts and Foundation stakeholders, the PHP Foundation board voted unanimously to offer the position to Volker Dusch (@edorian). We asked Volker to introduce himself.

Meet Volker

👋,

Some of you may know me as one of the PHP 8.5 Release Managers, or might have met me at one of more than 100 PHP-related conferences I've visited or spoken at in the last 20 years.

PHP has been the main programming language of my professional career, from helping maintain PHPUnit for a couple of years and more recently, working on various language RFCs.

In the past, I've worked on a high-traffic social networking site, remote monitoring of solar plants and software for medical trials. Currently, I'm working on PHP performance and monitoring tooling at Tideways, which I'm grateful to for allowing me to take some time off to focus on this new challenge.

Interested in hearing from me? Got feedback?

My goal is to be open and communicate early about how the Ecosystem Security Team is taking shape while making the most of the resources we have.

Big projects and foundational libraries are on my radar for security analysis already, and I'm especially keen to hear from people who want to actively collaborate and have the bandwidth to do so.

So if you want to put your project forward or have questions or comments for me, I'd love to hear from you!

Get in touch via email: volker@thephp.foundation.

You can also find me on Mastodon and LinkedIn.

Our goal is to capture perspectives from across the PHP community – we want as many voices as possible to be included. To make that happen, we’re starting by collecting suggestions for survey questions.

This week, you can submit your proposed questions and upvote others through a dedicated form. We’ll review all submissions and select the most interesting ones to include in the survey, which will launch in June. If you have an idea for a question, you can submit your question here.

The submissions are open until April 28, 2026. We look forward to hearing from you!

Part 1: Feedback from the Community

Oh my friends, we have so much to talk about.

I’ve been with The PHP Foundation for a few weeks, and many people have asked me about my vision, goals, and strategy for the upcoming year. In my opinion, The PHP Foundation’s stated mission of ensuring the long-term prosperity of the PHP language can be interpreted many different ways. So what exactly does this mean in terms of actionable efforts that will impact the community in the ways that align with this mission?

To answer that question, my goal was simple: listen to people who have a vested interest in the success of PHP and see what themes emerge. So I opened my calendar, messages, and email, and you all answered the call.

So far, I have connected with around 60 people from 18 countries. I’ve heard from PHP community members, people working in the ecosystem, maintainers of PHP projects, consultants, sponsors, core developers, leaders of other open source foundations, user group organizers, and of course, our own Foundation staff and Board members. I am thrilled that you all had a lot to say, because as I’ve said before, apathy is a much harder problem to tackle.

Before I share the findings, It is important to note a few things:

• Even though people identified many issues that could be better, there is still much love for PHP and the community.
• Some of the issues brought to me are not within the scope of The PHP Foundation’s authority. That being said, there are places where we can offer our support.
• These findings represent the concerns that were brought to me, and they aren’t presented as “fact” or official opinions of The PHP Foundation.
• Some of the findings may be of no surprise to you. And some of them may not resonate with you personally. I’d just ask that you keep in mind that the feedback is honestly presented as it was shared, and that these are also valid experiences from others.

High Level Summary of Findings

Overall, these were the biggest takeaways:

• PHP’s biggest challenges are perception, coordination, and onboarding, not technical capability
• The community loves the language and would choose PHP over other options, despite the challenges
• The ecosystem is large but fragmented
• The newcomer experience, education, and talent pipeline have room for improvement
• The PHP Foundation’s role and impact is not well understood
• Funding is a shared challenge across open source
• AI brings much uncertainty and many polarizing opinions, so agreeing upon a unified approach will be very challenging

I've classified the feedback I received into four primary buckets:

I created this slide presentation to share and summarize the feedback I received. You can also view it on GitHub as a PDF or in Markdown. I encourage you to take a look.

What’s Next?

In a follow up blog post (Part 2), I will be sharing The PHP Foundation’s strategies that aim to address some of these issues. And as always, please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have input or feedback to share. You can reach me via email or you can schedule some 1:1 time with me on my calendar.

Please join us in welcoming Matt to the Foundation Board!

A little about me

PHP was my introduction to open source, when PHP 3 was the latest release. It was mind blowing to see an amazing group of smart, funny people collaborate with each other, help newbies, and build impactful things together while still having fun. People who lived thousands of miles away from each other and who had never met each other. People who had completely different backgrounds and daily lives. People who spoke different languages and lived in different time zones. They all managed to find a way to come together as a community. They wrote code, they organized events, they started local user groups, they built projects together, and they helped each other learn. Forgive my sentimentality, but it was (and still is) magical.

It was this sense of community that fascinated me most, and I found myself moving from PHP development to open source community management. Since officially making that switch in 2010, I’ve worked for companies like GitHub, Sourceforge, and Pivotal, striving to make open source healthier, more inclusive, and better for everyone. I wanted anyone with an interest to be able to join the open source party, bring their unique set of skills, and experience the magic firsthand.

For the last 6 years, I have worked as the Community Manager for an open source project called CHAOSS which focuses on open source community health and sustainability. It has been an unforgettable experience, I’m very proud of what we all accomplished together, and I love that community very much. But as I find my career pivoting back toward PHP, it honestly feels like coming home again.

Looking to the future

The progress that has been made by the Foundation in the last few years is remarkable! Moving forward, you can expect to see the same kind of commitment to improving the PHP language and to keeping PHP relevant and sustainable.

In addition, we aim to increase the Foundation’s transparency and openness, and to strengthen our collaborative relationships with users, sponsors, contributors, organizations, and the PHP community at large. A solid and thriving PHP ecosystem belongs to and benefits us all, but none of us can make that happen alone.

Let’s chat!

Because we’re all in this together, I want to spend the next 1-2 months really listening to what you have to say. I have an open calendar and I encourage you to reserve some time with me. I want to hear from PHP developers, contributors, companies using PHP, independent consultants, sponsors, community members, and anyone else interested in the future of PHP. I want to hear about your goals, your motivations, your pain points, and yes, even your wacky and unorthodox ideas. And if meetings aren’t your thing, that’s completely understandable. You can also send me an email. (I’ll even check my inbox!)

PHP’s secret recipe has always been its community and I can’t wait to be collaborating with you all again!

Elizabeth brings a rare combination of deep roots in the PHP community and proven leadership in open-source governance. She co-founded a volunteer-based nonprofit dedicated to supporting women and non-binary individuals in the PHP industry, served as Community Manager at GitHub where she led developer outreach programs including the Patchwork initiative, and has been active in CHAOSS – a project focused on open-source community health metrics.

Her experience spanning community building, fundraising, outreach operations, and open-source strategy makes her a natural fit to lead the foundation into its next chapter.

As previously announced, founding Executive Director Roman Pronskiy is transitioning to focus on his growing role at JetBrains, while continuing to serve on the Board of Directors. Roman will work closely with Elizabeth to ensure a smooth handover.

Please join us in welcoming Elizabeth. We're looking forward to what's ahead. 🐘💜