This is just some thoughts on being a PHP developer in 2015.

A standard web project before used to just require you to setup a local web server, and then you’d upload to a standard web host with some worries about PHP versions perhaps but little to no thought required for the server side of things.Frameworks were a new thing, CodeIgniter was (to me at the time) the best thing to happen to PHP, introducing me to PHP MVC patterns, easily integrated vendor libraries (I never got into Zend Framework) and Twig .

Now a web project involves using programs such as Composer, Bower and Grunt just to manage project dependencies. Then you have PHP & JS frameworks like Symfony , Laravel, AngularJS that have really made life so much easier for us developers. Of course this all comes at a cost of having to put in time into learning all these new frameworks and tools, but the benefits of doing so are just amazing; development time goes way down and you create much better products. I wish I could further go into the benefits of each but they all require posts of their own to really get across their individual uses, I’ll attempt to get to that!

Working with UNIX servers is pretty standard for most web developers now, myself included. I’ve been using DigitalOcean for all my hosting, they really are a great host and I recommend them to anyone searching. Anyway a tool I found lately for server management which I guess is what has caused this post is Ajenti , before this I was using ISPConfig for the aim of being able to manage my servers easier than via ssh, however I found it’s interface pretty clunky and just overall slow, always ending up in ssh. After testing Ajenti in a fresh droplet I changed completely over to it on my other servers, so far it’s been amazing, I’m still using ssh here and there but overall Ajenti has really solved my problem so thanks guys. The install was amazingly simple too I recommend anyone looking for a GUI for their server to check it out.

So there seems to be a lot more to PHP web development now in 2015 than there was just a few years ago, though I personally feel all of it is for the better, making my life easier. It makes me wonder what it will be like in another few years though, whats next?

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