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Php terms

270 terms of 1489 total · page 1 of 14

🐘 The engine behind the web's most-used server-side language

PHP powers an enormous portion of the web — from WordPress and Laravel to custom e-commerce platforms. This category covers the language internals, core functions, OOP features, type system, performance patterns, and PHP-specific quirks that every serious PHP developer should understand deeply. Whether you are writing procedural scripts or building full-stack applications with modern PHP 8.x features, these terms form the foundation.

More on PHP history · 5 references · key concepts

History

PHP began in 1995 as a simple set of Perl scripts created by Rasmus Lerdorf to track visits to his personal website, evolving into a dedicated language called "Personal Home Page Tools." By version 3.0 (1997–1998), it became a fully-featured server-side scripting language adopted widely for web development, with PHP 4 (2000) introducing the Zend Engine and significantly improving performance and architecture. The object-oriented paradigm matured substantially in PHP 5 (2004), bringing proper class-based inheritance, interfaces, and exception handling, while PHP 7 (2015) delivered major performance gains and type declarations. Modern PHP (8.0+, released 2020 onwards) introduced named arguments, attributes, union types, match expressions, and later DNF types and fibers, reflecting maturation toward enterprise-grade systems while maintaining backward compatibility and its historical accessibility for rapid web development. Today, PHP powers over 75% of websites with known server-side technology, ranging from simple content management systems to complex frameworks like Laravel and Symfony.

Key concepts

  • Constants (define vs const)
  • Variables & Type Basics
  • Arrays & Array Functions
  • Functions & Closures
  • Object-Oriented Programming Basics
  • Exception Handling (try/catch/finally)
  • Error Handling in PHP
  • Composer & Dependency Management

Best references

  • PHP Official Documentation The canonical reference for all PHP language features, functions, and standard library. Essential for accurate syntax, behavior, and version-specific changes across all 270 terms in this category.
  • PHP RFC Archive Official Request for Comments documenting the design and rationale behind language features like attributes, enums, fibers, and type system enhancements. Invaluable for understanding why features were introduced and their historical context.
  • Modern PHP by Josh Lockhart Seminal practical guide covering contemporary PHP patterns, best practices, and ecosystem tools like Composer. Bridges language features with real-world architectural patterns relevant to dependency injection and error handling.
  • PHP-FIG Standards (PSR) Framework Interoperability Group specifications defining community standards for autoloading (PSR-4), coding style, interfaces, and more. Critical for understanding conventions around autoloaders, DI containers, and class organization.
  • Composer Official Documentation Complete reference for dependency management, autoloading configuration, and composer scripts. Essential for understanding the modern PHP ecosystem and how Composer resolves the terms related to package management and autoloading.
🧠 Logic graph · PHP
110 edges here
17 verbs used
114 terms touched
✦ Latest in PHP

Typed relationships here

Edges touching a PHP term.

🤖 AI Guestbook — PHP educational data only
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Ahrefs 19Scrapy 15ChatGPT 10Google 9SEMrush 6Common Crawl 6Sogou 4Perplexity 4Bing 1
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Most referenced — PHP
Deprecation Notices & Migration Strategy 3Interfaces 3PHP 5 OOP Revolution — Objects by Reference 2include vs require vs *_once 2DNF Types (PHP 8.2) 2Undefined Array Key / Offset Errors 2PHP Sessions 2Memory Exhaustion 2
Spread Operator & Variadic Args (PHP 5.6) 4PHP Version Upgrade Checklist 4DateTimeImmutable vs DateTime 4First-Class Callable Syntax (PHP 8.1) 4intval() / Type Casting 4Built-in PHP Attributes 3Exception Handling (try/catch/finally) 3password_hash() 3
Undefined Array Key / Offset Errors 253Division by Zero & DivisionByZeroError 222Array Destructuring ([] = …) 222Type Coercion 204password_hash() — Native Bcrypt (PHP 5.5) 176Exception Handling (try/catch/finally) 156Type Declarations Overview 135allow_url_fopen / allow_url_include 125
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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
HTTP Cookies in PHP PHP 7.3+
Cookies are small key-value pairs sent by the server via Set-Cookie and echoed back by the browser on every request — PHP sets them with setcookie() before any output, with Secure, HttpOnly, and SameSite flags controlling safety.
2mo ago php beginner
MySQL charset=utf8mb4 PHP 5.1+
The correct MySQL character set for full Unicode support — including emoji and supplementary characters that the older utf8 charset cannot store.
2mo ago php beginner
MySQL Connection Pooling PHP 5.1+
Reusing database connections across requests instead of opening and closing a new connection on every request.
2mo ago php intermediate
MySQL DSN (Data Source Name) PHP 5.1+
The connection string passed to PDO specifying the database driver, host, port, database name, and charset.
2mo ago php beginner
PDO Error Handling PHP 5.1+
PDO has three error modes — silent, warning, and exception — controlling how database errors surface.
2mo ago php beginner
PDO Fetch Modes PHP 5.1+
Constants controlling how PDO returns rows — as arrays, objects, or custom classes.
2mo ago php beginner
PDO lastInsertId() PHP 5.1+
Returns the auto-increment ID generated by the most recent INSERT statement.
2mo ago php beginner
PDO Named Placeholders PHP 5.1+
Named parameters (:name) in prepared statements — more readable than positional ? placeholders for queries with multiple parameters.
2mo ago php beginner
PDO query() vs prepare() PHP 5.1+
PDO query() executes raw SQL immediately — prepare() parameterises it. query() must never include user-controlled values.
CWE-89 OWASP A3:2021
2mo ago php beginner 9.8
Diagram: PDO Transactions PDO Transactions PHP 5.1+
PDO wraps multiple queries in an atomic unit — either all succeed or all roll back.
2mo ago php intermediate
PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES PHP 5.1+
Controls whether PDO sends real prepared statements to the database or emulates them client-side in PHP.
CWE-89 OWASP A3:2021
2mo ago php intermediate
PDOStatement::bindParam() vs bindValue() PHP 5.1+
Two PDO methods for binding variables to placeholders — bindParam() binds by reference (evaluated at execute), bindValue() binds by value (evaluated immediately).
2mo ago php intermediate
PDOStatement::rowCount() PHP 5.1+
Returns the number of rows affected by the last DELETE, INSERT, or UPDATE — unreliable for SELECT.
2mo ago php beginner
PHP Generators PHP 5.5+
Functions using yield that produce values lazily — one at a time — instead of building a complete array in memory.
2mo ago php intermediate
Diagram: PHP Fibers — Internals & Scheduler Patterns PHP Fibers — Internals & Scheduler Patterns PHP 8.1+
How PHP Fibers work under the hood — stack allocation, suspension mechanics, and how to build a cooperative multitasking scheduler on top of the Fiber API introduced in PHP 8.1.
3mo ago php advanced
#[Override] Attribute (PHP 8.3) PHP 8.3+
The #[Override] attribute tells PHP (and static analysers) that a method is intentionally overriding a parent class or interface method — if no such method exists in a parent, PHP throws an error at class load time.
3mo ago php intermediate
Abstract readonly Properties PHP 8.4+
PHP 8.4 allows abstract readonly properties in abstract classes and interfaces — defining that implementations must provide a readonly property of a specific type.
3mo ago php advanced
Anonymous Functions / Closures (PHP 5.3) PHP 5.3+ 🧠 1
PHP 5.3 introduced anonymous functions (closures) — function() {} expressions assignable to variables, passable as callbacks, and able to capture outer scope with use().
3mo ago php intermediate
array_column() — Plucking Values from Arrays PHP 5.5+
array_column() extracts a single column from a multi-dimensional array or array of objects — the idiomatic PHP replacement for foreach loops that build lookup arrays, and for creating ID-indexed maps.
3mo ago php beginner
array_find() / array_find_key() (PHP 8.4) PHP 8.4+ 🧠 4
PHP 8.4 adds array_find() and array_find_key() — built-in functions that return the first element (or key) matching a callback predicate, replacing verbose foreach loops or array_filter() + reset() patterns.
3mo ago php beginner
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