The PHP Foundation's blog reports on funding, language development such as generics and the pipe operator, and its annual impact reports.
HN commenters point to it as the source for the Foundation's activity, including annual transparency reports, funding appeals, and its post on the state of PHP generics.
Huge shout-out to the PHP Foundation for this.
Last year, it received close to 680K USD, and managed this security audit, sponsored 10 developers, and paid for various expenses. For a language that runs close to 75% of the web, it certainly deserves more funding.
Some of the recent initiatives from the Foundation (https://thephp.foundation/blog/2025/03/31/transparency-and-impact-report-2024/) :
- All PHP versions now receive a total of 4 years of security updates; 2 bug fixes + 2 security, up from 3.
- PIE: A replacement for PECL, to easily install PHP extensions (C, C++ compiled, not PHP packages).
- The security audit.
(I'm one of the PHP Core team and a volunteer at the foundation, happy to answer any questions, but almost all of the work is public)
> And what makes Automattic's contributions any different?
Well, unlike WPEngine, Automattic and Matt make significant contribution beyond their ecosystem, here are some:
- Let's encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/
- Matrix's open protocol: https://matrix.org/
- The PHP Foundation: https://thephp.foundation/
- Open Source Initiative: https://opensource.org/
- And the list goes on: contributing and sponsoring many projects and developers that everyone using the web benefited from, including you and billions of people (not counting wordpress's impact)
Please educate yourself before spreading FUD about people who made great contributions constantly to the open web, the entire industry, and promoted open source on every chance they got.
> PHP community lacks the resources to see a non-PHP tool thrive.
Why do you think so?
The PHP Foundation has raised over 2 million USD in contribution and has over 500K in their balance currently according to:
https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation
PHP has some well funded groups using it like Wordpress, Wikipedia, Laravel to name a few.
And recently the PHP Foundation started officially sponsoring a Go project, FrankenPHP.
https://thephp.foundation/blog/2025/05/15/frankenphp/
So PHP looks like a friendly and well supported community to foster tooling made in other languages.
If you're interested about generics in PHP, you can read this blog post by the PHP foundation: https://thephp.foundation/blog/2024/08/19/state-of-generics-and-collections/ or this PR by Nikita: https://github.com/PHPGenerics/php-generics-rfc/issues/45.
TLDR: The PHP compiler isn't really suited for the job, it would introduce a lot of complexity to an already complex codebase and the memory/performance hit would be substantial.
> What did they do last year? There is no annual public report of their activity.
There is[1][2][3], the one for 2025 just isn't out yet.
[1]: https://thephp.foundation/blog/2025/03/31/transparency-and-impact-report-2024/
[2]: https://thephp.foundation/blog/2024/02/26/transparency-and-impact-report-2023/
[3]: https://thephp.foundation/blog/2022/11/22/transparency-and-impact-report-2022/
> It will happily accept string in a array of dates, for example
While completely true, you are using static analyzer anyway which won’t let you do this.
The generics support will likely come in the near future, there has been momentum in it again: https://thephp.foundation/blog/2025/08/05/compile-generics/