Tech Weekly

PHP still gets mocked at tech conferences. At the same time, PHP still powers around 77% of websites that use a known server-side language. Both of those things are true in 2026. And that gap says more about perception than reality. A 14-Year Perspective I’ve been writing PHP for more.

Recently, Cloudflare introduced a new open-source CMS called EmDash, describing it as a “spiritual successor” to WordPress. That alone is a bold statement, especially considering WordPress still powers more than 40% of the web. But what caught my attention wasn’t the ambition. It was the reason behind it. The Problem.

Recently, I ran into a problem that looked simple at first, but quickly turned into a performance bottleneck. I needed to fetch a directory of cities and branches from a third-party delivery service for an ecommerce checkout page. Since the store supports multiple languages, the same dataset had to be.

Over the years, I’ve deployed a lot of projects. Small client websites, Laravel apps, WordPress installs, internal tools… and almost every time, the process looked similar. Spin up a VPS, install a stack, configure domains, set up backups, tweak security, and repeat. It worked, but it was never smooth. Every.