As much as people hate MySQL and PHP stack. I think a large percent of the web is still using it. And it is comparatively cheaper. For example, even the beginner web developer can deploy it easily without having to use VPS.

However there are some changes coming these days with many PHP developers moving from MySQL to PostgreSQL. I am not sure what could be the reason. You can PHP PDO Connect to Postgresql easily. And there is less code changes to make if you are using PDO.

Startups can save a lot of money with the PHP and XSQL stacks. Many freelancers and low cost business are saving the money with that stack. I don't see this changing any time soon.

PHP is a turing complete language, and MySQL is a relational DB, so between the two there is very little you can't accomplish, unless you want to start doing full text search against millions of records in a database - at which point you need to augment the stack with something like ElasticSearch, or switch from MySQL to Postgres.

If it's a traditional request/response site, or a simple API to power a rich client-side app or mobile app, yes, absolutely. In fact, I wouldn't choose any other language for this since PHP gives you great architectural design features like object type safety, but without the need to for a manual compile step. So you get similar benefits of Java or C#, but with the instant interpreted language feedback of Ruby and Python. And because of the stateless nature of PHP, you don't have to restart a server like you do in Python. Have an error? Correct it and refresh the page. Done (unless you switch over to a looped process with PHP PM, but that's not standard PHP).

However, if it's a real-time app with live growl/push notifications, chat, and all sorts of other things, then no - you cannot really do this with your requirement of plain PHP + MySQL alone. PHP must be either made to run in a loop with a runtime like PHP PM or react PHP, or you must augment the stack with Node + Socket.io + Redis.

PHP 7 is very, very nice. And the frameworks and libraries are getting as good as on any other language/platform, which used to be a serious problem. For my last project we evaluated Java/Play, NodeJS/Restify, C# and PHP/SLIM, with a team of very experienced developers. We choose PHP/SLIM. Plus an AngularJS front-end.

I switched to Python mostly due to the large number of vulnerabilities in PHP, With my tool https://github.com/Leo-G/Flask-Scaffold You can Quickly scaffold a Database Driven CRUD Application and API with Python n MySQL then why use PHP ?

This Diagram says it all w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_lan…

PHP is still relevant. However coding like its 1999 is not relevant. Keep it fresh - adopt modern development patterns suitable for your project, be PSR-2 compliant, use the latest version of PHP etc.

Yes, most relevant.

The PHP ecosystem is great. Tools such as composer, PHP frameworks and others show the evolution of language. And the new features of version seven show the growth of language.

But, not resolve all problems. So, languages such Node, Go, Python, can resolve problems better php.

PHP is indeed still relevant, and it will remain so for next few years or till the Apocalypse! Reason? As Cliff said, it is really easy to get started and you already have the libraries you need to get your application up and running, at an unbelievable rate(I mean, time)! Let say, for an example, I can build a simple CRUD(hypothetically speaking) project faster in PHP than Java, not that I'm bad at Java, but the ease of doing things. And the hosting! It is cheaper and options are endless. To tell you how cheap it is, I've once bargained a vendor to give me hosting for 1$ a month and he gave!!! Because my bandwidth is not a lot and project is not big either.

So unless something trumps these advantages of PHP, it will stay. And I don't see any new-comer going to shake things for PHP, because it already spread out and going to stay strong till the end!

Here's my take:

PHP is one of many server side stacks that isn't going anywhere any time soon. The popular notion that PHP is somehow inferior is incredibly short sighted (unfortunately the community around my favourite platform, Ruby on Rails can be quite insufferable in this respect sometimes). Sure there's Java's various offerings, there's Rails, and Django, and all the other usual suspects - but none of them are as quick and easy to get off the ground as PHP.

Why? Because unlike most other popular platforms, it comes with all the bells and whistles that you might need for most projects up to a certain size or complexity (more on that in a second), and because there are PHP hosts aplenty out there to pick from because PHP is extremely easy to set up and to secure, so it's a no brainer for a web host to offer. There's literally nothing as accessible as PHP when it comes to web development and hosting.

It also comes down to language somewhat. PHP is straightforward and intentionally devoid of magic, especially compared to say Ruby where magic is a part of the ecosystem. Now Ruby isn't a complicated language by any stretch, but it's not just about the apparent simplicity of the language syntax. Anyone could pick up Ruby pretty quickly and start creating something in Rails, but unless that person is an experienced Ruby developer they'll quickly start coming unstuck when they need to dig into other people's source code and they're seeing magic they haven't seen before. PHP and its libraries (like Pear) don't have this problem and remain extremely accessible all the way through.

I mentioned that PHP projects are good up to a certain size or complexity. What I mean is that while PHP is perfectly sufficient for a lot of different types of projects, there are a lot of projects that aren't feasible on an out of the box PHP install, which means that you'll need to create your own production environment, which ultimately means that unless your skills are already heavily invested in PHP then you may as well use a platform that is built for this kind of project already and save yourself the headache of going against the grain and retrofitting something that isn't built for purpose.

Edit: I actually meant to say something else but completely forgot by the time I'd typed all that..

If you want to determine whether a platform is "still relevant", there are various places you can look to get an idea. For a start, check out sites like this to get an idea of a platform's current popularity in terms of number of websites running them (FYI PHP is currently 82.1%), and sites like this (or the equivalent in your country) to see how in demand jobs for a particular platform are, and also check the source control repository for a given platform to see what kinds of issues there are, whether they are being fixed, whether there is positive activity in the project itself - and finally, mailing lists can be a good indicator of people's general satisfaction and whether people are looking elsewhere (in which case you'll see a lot of "this vs that" posts).

Absolutely!

The only people NodeJS / React / AngularJS / the Javascript Framework Wars mean anything to are startups that want to be fancy; programmers that want to be fancy or people that want to learn those frameworks.

You cannot trump the power of SQL - be it MySQL or Postgres or Oracle or SQL Server or etc...

Anyone freelancing and using Wordpress - yes, still incredible relevant.

Any web development shop - the kind you call to build you a website for your restaurant or small business - yes, still relevant.

Corporate work? If they are not using Java (not javascript) they are using PHP (or rails).

It's still wildly compatible with most if not all 3rd party services - Mailgun, Cloudinary, Stripe and others.

It can make cron jobs super easy - php myscript.php from the command line and done and done.

Your customers - don't care if the website uses React or AJS or whatever. They care that it works / fit their budget and can be maintained / upgraded easily. And as much as everyone and their mother might be trying to learn JS frameworks - there are many many more programmers that can jump right into a PHP program and pickup where the old programmers left of.

Frameworks come and go - PHP / Rails / Python are established languages that are here to stay for a long time, IMO.