Despite not being the hottest topic lately, PHP still holds the bar as one of the most popular and sought-after technologies for web development. According to the latest Stack Overflow survey, it’s still in the top 10 in the list of most popular languages. Regarding the breadth of use, PHP is the king of the hill. As W3Techs shows, PHP code is running on 77.4% of all websites around the globe.

All the above shows that PHP is still worthy of your attention in 2023 despite multiple more modern alternatives. To gain new knowledge in writing better code, whether you use PHP or any other programming language, you, among other things, can dig into someone else’s code. It helps to understand how certain things are built, learn best coding practices, and find inspiration for your own projects. Today, we’ll consider some PHP projects with open source code that will help you to sharpen your skills.

What’s PHP and What Are the Benefits of Using It? 

Let’s start with the basics. PHP is a server-side scripting language that has cemented its place as a leading force in the world of dynamic web development. People choose it for its flexibility and ease of use, making it an ideal choice for both beginners and seasoned developers alike.

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One of PHP’s main advantages lies in its unparalleled support for databases. Whether you’re utilizing MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or NoSQL databases, PHP’s extensive library support ensures seamless interaction, enabling developers to manage data with remarkable efficiency.

Moreover, PHP’s extensive community-driven libraries and frameworks, like Laravel, Symfony, and CodeIgniter provide a plethora of tools, making it a go-to choice for rapid project development. The well-structured and feature-rich frameworks simplify complex tasks and accelerate development while maintaining high code quality.

The versatility of ways PHP developers can use this technology knows no bounds. For example, it powers multiple major content management systems (CMS), like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. You can use it in your projects to build anything from an e-commerce platform to a social network. Plus, it enables seamless integration with popular web servers like Apache and Nginx.

Open Source Projects You Can Lay Your Hand On

File Storage

Flysystem is a PHP project with open source code that revolutionizes work with the filesystem. It offers a unified and straightforward approach by abstracting the differences between various file system types, including local and cloud-based ones. You can utilize a consistent API to integrate it into your projects seamlessly. You can use it in any web application that works with data storage to make it more efficient and user-friendly.

Source: Handy Custom CRM Software

 

One of Flysystem’s standout features is its remarkable flexibility. It provides access to an array of adapters and plugins, empowering PHP developers to extend and tailor the library’s functionality to match their specific needs. Leveraging advanced caching and optimization techniques, flysystem ensures high code efficiency even when handling substantial volumes of data, eliminating performance concerns.

Personal Relationship Management System

Monica is a Personal Relationship Management (PRM) web application developed on PHP by Monicahq. The main aim of this project is to help individuals to organize and record their interactions with others. It works as a CRM tailored for managing relationships with friends and family. The Monica project is designed for individuals who struggle to remember important details about the lives of people they care about, including those with conditions, like Asperger syndrome or Alzheimer’s disease. It provides a private and personal space for users to keep track of essential information about their friends and family.

Users can add and manage contacts, defining relationships between them. Monica offers automatic birthday reminders and lets users stay in touch with contacts at specified intervals. Users can record activities with their contacts, ensuring essential details are not forgotten. Monica allows adding notes and maintaining a basic journal, enabling people to remember important information about their connections and daily experiences. The web application helps to manage gifts given and received and keep track of tasks related to their contacts. The project provides an API covering most of the data, allowing further integration and customization.

Logging Library

Monolog is a highly regarded PHP logging library with open source code. This project extends a straightforward and adaptable API, allowing developers to log messages from their PHP applications to diverse channels, including files, databases, and various third-party services. The modularity of this project’s source code provides an assortment of handlers and processors that seamlessly combine and configure to cater to specific logging requirements for any application.

One standout feature of Monolog is its support for PSR-3, a standard logging interface in PHP. Using it in your source code, you can switch between different logging libraries without necessitating any significant modifications.

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Email Sending Library

PHPMailer, as the name suggests, is an email-sending tool for PHP. It offers a straightforward and reliable approach to sending email messages from PHP applications. Security remains a top priority for the PHPMailer creators. It is equipped with built-in support for SSL/TLS encryption, ensuring the protection of email messages against interception and tampering. Moreover, it implements safeguards against common email injection attacks, effectively countering header injection and body injection vulnerabilities.

Key Features:

  • Wide Adoption. This library is extensively used by numerous open-source projects, including WordPress, Drupal, 1CRM, SugarCRM, Yii, Joomla!, and many others;
  • SMTP Support. PHPMailer integrates SMTP support, enabling email sending even without a local mail server;
  • Flexible Addressing. PHPMailer allows sending emails with multiple recipients in the To, CC, BCC, and Reply-to fields;
  • Multipart/Alternative Emails. It supports multipart/alternative emails, catering to mail clients that may not read HTML emails;
  • Attachments: PHPMailer facilitates adding attachments to email messages.

Interactive Shell for PHP Developers

psysh is an interactive shell that enables developers to explore and experiment with PHP code without the need to write the source code for an entire application. It provides a simple and user-friendly shell interface where you can enter PHP code and instantly observe the results. Also, psysh is a configurable tool equipped with various plugins and modules. Therefore, you can customize it the way you want.

Event Management System

event-management is a GitHub project with open source code that presents a comprehensive PHP and MySQL-based solution for event management. Utilizing modern web technologies, like HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery, this system offers event organizers an intuitive and user-friendly platform. Download it, understand what the source code does, adapt it to your needs, and get a beauty like the one you see below:

Source: Custom-Made Event Management and Planning Software

 

With its fully responsive user interface, event organizers can effortlessly access and utilize the system from any device, whether it’s a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Thanks to its active maintenance and thriving user community, this project emerges as a dependable and stable choice for those seeking to streamline their event management processes effectively.

HTTP Client

Guzzle is a PHP HTTP client library. It’s a simple and effective solution for sending HTTP requests and managing HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.0 responses. This versatile tool excels in several areas, allowing developers to build query strings quickly, send POST requests, upload JSON data, and handle other HTTP-related tasks. Moreover, Guzzle facilitates both synchronous and asynchronous request handling, providing flexibility for different scenarios.

This PHP library follows PSR-7 interfaces for requests, responses, and streams, ensuring compatibility with other PSR-7 compatible libraries. Additionally, it supports PSR-18, enabling interoperability with other HTTP clients adhering to the PSR-18 standard.

This library with open source code abstracts the underlying HTTP transport, eliminating complex dependencies on specific implementations, like curl, PHP streams, sockets, or non-blocking event loops. This feature allows developers to write environment and transport-agnostic code, promoting flexibility and portability.

Read Also: The Difference Between Asynchronous and Synchronous Programming

Code Quality Tool

Churn-php helps to evaluate the complexity of your PHP projects. You can use it to analyze your code and find areas requiring attention. By examining code in each PHP file, it performs critical tasks, such as checking the number of commits and calculating cyclomatic complexity.

Based on these values, it generates a score, providing valuable insights into the areas that may benefit from code improvements and optimization. Gathered info can be used for improving code quality via refactoring the problematic parts of your code.

Read Also: Code Refactoring. Major Benefits and Best Techniques

Test Data Generator

Faker is a PHP project that allows you to generate data for various testing scenarios. It excels in multilingual support, capable of generating fake data in multiple languages and diverse formats. This feature allows testing multilingual applications and enriching databases with authentic-looking test data.

Faker’s customizability allows developers to fine-tune data types and formats to align with specific project requirements. The combination of a user-friendly interface and adaptable functionality can make this PHP project an excellent addition to your development tools.

Conclusions

In capable hands, PHP code can do wonders. You can use it to create web applications and auxiliary utilities, enabling efficient development and rich functionality. The best part about PHP is that you can use plenty of open source projects for inspiration. You can always find one that better suits your needs and skill set, decompound it to understand how certain things are done, and include some parts in your code. If you’re looking for something more complex than a pet PHP project, you can always contact us and rely on industry professionals.