Is core PHP still relevant in 2025? I am not talking frameworks Laravel, Symfony
I have been searching on sites like freelancer.com for projects that contain PHP. Some projects give to understand that they are talking about core PHP(but I think they are talking about frameworks), and some projects do talk about core PHP(they mention it specifically). But I look on google and reddit and find a lot of people saying that core PHP is dead. I think I found one article saying that it is relevant and not going anywhere. So my question is, is it okay to learn core PHP and MySQL(and I am not talking about PHP frameworks like Laravel or Symfony)? Especially in terms for freelancing. I am aware of RESTful APIs and using cURL and maybe a front end with vanilla JS. But will I be making a mistake developing core PHP web apps? I find it more easier and more productive when using core PHP compared to Laravel or Django or Flask for Python or Express for NodeJS. A lot easier. So do any of you still use core PHP either freelancing or for work in 2025?
PHP is still used widely and won't disappear any time soon. The reason is WordPress, hosting infrastructure, frameworks & package ecosystem and talent pool & knowledge base. Nobody is going to migrate millions of sites. Also PHP did few things right. For example, for each request PHP creates / reuses a new thread with its own isolated context where things are done mostly sequentially. This means that PHP gives you some decent horizontal scaling out of the box. Also if the code misbehaves, crashes or hangs, there is a chance that it will be limited to only one request.
https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-06-12/my-honest-opinion-ab...
No. PHP has been dead for years. Most of its continued usage (by a wide margin) is WordPress.
If you like PHP, you will likely easily learn and enjoy C# or Kotlin. With help from Claude or similar, you can get a project setup and be productive the same day.
> So do any of you still use core PHP either freelancing or for work in 2025?
No. PHP is dead.