What Are the PHP Trends in 2025

In this article you will learn about:

2. Last Year

3. 8 PHP Trends in 2025

1. Happy Birthday PHP Classes Site for 26 Years

The PHP Classes site reach 26 years this week on June 24.

I am sure that this is not a perfect site but it will continue to improve according to the users needs and desires.

2. Last Year

Last year was of great challenges. Many issues have been fixed. Other issues are still being fixed.

Security has been a great issue to work on improvements. One specific issue is the robots that keep accessing this and other sites. There are two kinds of robots. The good ones crawl the site to show pages in the search engine's site results.

I will not comment on the bad robots besides the following. We are working on better methods to avoid our servers being overloaded with an excessive number of simultaneous requests. I will comment more on this in a future article.

We also improved our newsletter delivery systems to work more in a compliant way with email delivery standards. You are probably seeing this article because you received a newsletter from the PHP Classes site.

Regarding PHP component contributions, we have improved the feedback to authors in order to help them improve their package pages with new content that is appreciated by package users.

3. 8 PHP Trends in 2025

3.1. Developers Will Become Business Owners

Many developers will move from being an entrepreneur of level 1 (employee) or level 2 (autonomous worker) to level 3 (business owner).

There are 4 levels of entrepreneur:

1. Employees

Work for a single customer to earn a limited salary. Often, they do not do what they want, but rather what the company manager tells them to do.

2. Autonomous worker

Work for one or more customers during the same period. Typically, a contract may end after its specified period and is not renewed. Usually earn more than employees and have their time fully occupied with work.

3. Business owner

A business owner sells the same products and services to multiple customers simultaneously. The business owner may develop his products or services, or resell products and services of suppliers

4. Investor

An investor pays the expenses of other people until they move to level 1, 2, or 3. Usually, your parents are your first investors. Often, the best investors are those who buy your products or services.

I only invest in trustworthy people and software that will run on machines.

3.2. Developers Will Sell API and Tools to Each Other

Many developers will realize that they can become business owners by developing and selling APIs and tools to other developers. This activity is often known as Software As A Service (SAAS).

Developing and marketing a SAAS product is often a burden to many developers. Therefore, they will partner with companies that will provide a Business As A Service (BAAS).

This means that developers will continue to be developers and the partner BAAS company will do the other parts of a business like: mentoring, research, advertising, sales, pricing, payments, taxes, etc...

3.3. Human Supervision Will Be the Best Way to Automate Tasks Using Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence emulates human intuition. This means they guess the results based on the knowledge of past results.

Weather forecasting is just one application of artificial intelligence. Sometimes, the weather forecast is correct; other times, it is incorrect.

Artificial intelligence tools have started gaining more visibility since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

Still, they are often not reliable because they are based on content that was previously published.

When the information in that content changes, it becomes outdated. So you frequently see responses from artificial intelligence tools that are no longer correct.

To avoid relying on responses from artificial intelligence tools that are incorrect, those responses need to be supervised by an experienced human being who understands the subjects of the responses.

Nowadays, there are companies that hire developers to test and fix the responses to prompts generated by artificial intelligence models.

Some of these companies work with developers under non-disclosure agreements. Therefore, developers are not allowed to comment publicly about the identity of the companies that develop those artificial intelligence models.

If you are interested in working on fixing artificial intelligence models, make sure your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date, so you can get these kinds of job offers.

3.4. Traditional Algorithmic Programming Will Always Be the Best Alternative to Automate Tasks Using Business Intelligence

Traditional algorithmic programming emulates human wisdom. This means it works based on evidence provided by tests. Therefore, it can be more reliable than programming using machine-learning-based artificial intelligence.

Still, machine-learning-based artificial intelligence may be more recommended in cases when it processes situations in which the patterns of events are very complex or change over time.

This is the reason why machine-learning-based artificial intelligence is better for weather forecasting applications. 

3.5. Other Professionals Will Work More on Intellectual Tasks with So Much Automation

Automation is good to free human beings from work done more with arms and legs. For instance, automated cars will free people from the work of driving the cars using steering wheels, brakes, accelerator pedals, etc...

Some cars just receive instructions about the traveling destination, and the car will drive itself towards that destination. This will free passengers to enjoy the ride and do more intellectual work.

3.6. Life will Become More Educative and Fun

3.7. Sites Will be Able to Earn Revenue using Educative Advertising

On the business side, developers who produce valuable content for other people will be able to earn revenue with better advertising.

Advertising of the past often used to interrupt content. Some users are upset by that kind of advertising that used to distract them or even slow down the loading of the site content.

Better advertising works differently. The content itself can be part of the advertising. For instance, an article or a video that teaches how to solve a problem for users is the beginning of an advertising piece.

At the end of the article or the video can tell more about a product or a service of the sponsor that can help the users to solve the same problem, probably faster.

For instance, here at the PHP Classes site, we have already sponsored tutorials since 2011. We have also reduced the number and placement of advertisements that interrupt the content.

The sponsored articles are tutorials that teach how to solve a problem that many users of the site have, and at the end, there is a banner or a link to the sponsor's product. We use newsletters to expose the sponsored tutorials to more PHP developers who registered for the site.

If you are interested in advertising products or services of interest to PHP developers, you may find more information in this form of advertising in the sponsorship pages of the site's e-commerce section.

If you click on the Buy button and then the other button that says Book Sponsorship with our partner Paved, you can access a page that gives more up-to-date statistics, and sometimes you can have access to promotions to buy campaigns at a discounted price.

3.8. Your Predictions