I know PHP is a very prevalent language, especially for Wordpress and Drupal. However, in my professional career so far, I've not worked for an employer who uses PHP in production and all of my web developer friends seem to use node.js, .NET, Ruby, or Python. A lot of my web pen testing training revolves around PHP and I know that it is still a huge language, but I'm having difficulty gaining visibility into just how prevalent PHP is in enterprise/business web development. From what I've seen, it seems to be used mainly for smaller business sites and CMSes, but this is just pure speculation on my part so it would be helpful to hear about how you use PHP or how your business uses PHP. Thanks.
I developed all my project with php (slim framework, and symfony)
We only use PHP for back end at work mainly to support legacy code base. Only 2 projects use PHP 7 and all others php 5.2 or 5.4.
Our main project's user codebase is of 30K+ users (e-learning). So PHP can deal with big projects despite being a very weak language (I hate its structure, the functions, the API that stop workings etc... sorry for the rant).
New websites (when simple enough) are done with WordPress. A few more complexe ones are done with CakePhp.
All the rest is done by hand.
Yeah, with a strong framework like Laravel running on top of good PHP 7+, it's a bliss.
I use PHP as the backbone for almost all my projects, and it's a common misconception that PHP isn't capable of handling large sites. Let me just shoot that down by name dropping Facebook here.
Since PHP 7, and especially 7.2, it has been possible to work with type strong methods which makes it even more suitable for enterprises. (Parameters and Return types).
It does require a bit of self control in order not to be a weak architecture, WordPress is a good example here on how NOT to structure your code. Laravel and Symfony are on the other hand very good examples on how it's done beautifully.
It is also important to remember that PHP is more focused than other languages are. So you can of course you only build backend stuff, while you still need JavaScript to power the frontend rendering.
I developed our population health management software in PHP.
The only reason I switched to nodejs is because php doesn't support web socket. Otherwise I'll still stick with php!
Noah Heck
Solving problems
We've created a suite of tools for behavioral health providers, therapeutic schools, and residential care centers using PHP and are very happy with the results. Ours is certainly not the largest service online, serving healthcare or otherwise, but we do have a respectable customer base with 10's of thousands of users. Each year, our software allows our users to provide care and service the business activities for around a million patients, which is exciting and terrifying at the same time.