20 Best PHP Experts, Bloggers and Influencers To Follow In 2022

Is PHP Dead? This question comes up more and more often in programming forums. And what is the answer? Of course "not"! PHP is the 8th most popular technology in the world. Moreover, it is used by 79.1% of all the websites whose server-side programming language.

Among PHP developers there is a vast community of world-class experts sharing their knowledge and experience. If you're wondering who is worth following this year, we invite you to check our list. Check out the 20 best PHP bloggers, experts, and influencers who may be your source of inspiration and the best evidence that PHP is not dead.

1. Sebastian Bergmann

• Website: https://sebastian-bergmann.de/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/s_bergmann 

Sebastian Bergmann is one of the most popular PHP experts and a pioneer in PHP quality assurance. He is a Co-founder of The PHP Consulting Company and creator of PHPUnit - programmer-oriented testing framework for PHP. Sebastian shares his knowledge on articles, presentations, and books on PHP-related topics. He is also active on Twitter and his account is followed by almost 19.000 followers. He publishes and shares interesting articles, discussions or his own presentations there.

2. Lorna Jane Mitchell

• Website: https://lornajane.net/ 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lornajane 

Lorna Jane Mitchell is a Developer Advocate for Aiven. She has also a PHP programming blog, conference speaker and author of many industry publications. Lorna loves to share her knowledge, so she is an open-source passionate. She wrote three books: "Git Workbook", "PHP Web Services", "PHP Master". On her Twitter feed, she often encourages collaborative discussion about PHP and programming overall. She also recommends there exciting books, events, or scientific publications that she thinks are worth knowing.

3. Larry Garfield

• Website: https://www.garfieldtech.com/ 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Crell  

Larry Garfield is a Staff Engineer with the TYPO3 project and ex-Director of Developer Experience for Platform. He was a long-time Drupal contributor and consultant who helped transform Drupal into a modern PHP platform. He is the author of many PHP-related books, including "Thinking Functionally in PHP" and "Exploring PHP 8.0." On his Twitter feed, Larry mostly shares interesting Tweets of other users and recommends interesting industry articles. What's interesting, he posts up to a dozen tweets a day. So, if you want to stay up to date with the news from the PHP world, you should follow his profile.

4. Matthew Weier O’Phinney

• Website: https://mwop.net/ 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mwop 

Matthew Weier O'Phinney is a software engineer, architect, and product manager. As he is passionate about sharing knowledge, he's an open-source software advocate. His tools help PHP developers to build and deploy their applications. 

He is active both on his a blog and Twitter profile, so we recommend keeping an eye on his activities. He posts on Twitter almost daily, and his blog articles usually appear once a month. Currently, most of his Tweets are about his hobby of painting. However, he also brings up interesting discussions about PHP and the tools used by software developers.

5. Taylor Otwell

• Website: https://medium.com/@taylorotwell
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/taylorotwell 

If you think your previous influencers had a lot of followers on Twitter, you'll definitely be impressed by this expert. Taylor Otwell has as many as 107.2 thousand of them, and this number is constantly growing. What is the key to his success? Taylor is the creator of Laravel — a popular open-source PHP web framework. If you are also a fan of his tool, you should follow his Twitter profile where you'll find new posts almost every day about this tool and any initiatives related to it. 3 years ago, Taylor also blogged on Medium, but currently does not publish new articles there.

6. Rob Allen

• Website: https://akrabat.com/ 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/akrabat 

Rob Allen is a software consultant and developer who runs his own company, Nineteen Feet. He contributes to many open-source projects such as rst2pdf, Slim Framework, or OpenWhisk. Rob is known by developers as a creator of Zend Framework — an open-source, object-oriented web application framework and co-creator of the Zend_Config core component in ZF1. He is a PHP blogger - he writes the technical articles about PHP, Python, rst2pdf, Slim Framework, Apache OpenWhisk and many more. He also regularly publishes new Twitter posts that usually don't contain any links, just his insightful thoughts or interesting questions to his followers.

7. Fabien Potencier

• Website: http://fabien.potencier.org/ 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/fabpot 

Fabien Potencier is an entrepreneur, writer, blogger, and speaker at international conferences. In 1998 he founded Sensio software development company. The PHP community associates him primarily as the creator of Symphony — a web application framework created in 2004. 

Fabien's Twitter is a treasure chest of knowledge about Symfony. You can find there a lot of information about all new updates and links to useful open-source projects published on Github.

8. Derick Rethans

• Website: https://derickrethans.nl/ 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/derickr 

Derick Rethans is a PHP expert and author of Xdebug — a widely used PHP debugging tool. He is an independent consultant and contractor on PHP extensions and related projects. He is a well-known conference speaker and the host of the weekly-ish PHP Internals News podcast. Derick is an author of php| architect's Guide to Date and Time Programming and the co-author of PHP 5 Power Programming. 

He shares both personal and professional experiences and thoughts on his Twitter feed. He has recently been posting links to his videos on Xdebug, a debugging extension for PHP.

9. Dries Buytaert

• Website: https://dri.es/ 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Dries 

Dries Buytaert is the creator of Drupal and the founder of Acquia. He's been working on Open Source for 20+ years. If you are looking for the best blog about PHP, just check his publications. He is an active PHP blogger: over the last 15 years, he published about 1.500 blog posts and over 30 notes. Currently, he regularly publishes one article per month there.

If you're a Drupal fan, be sure to follow his Twitter as well, where he regularly posts tweets about this tool.

10. Freek Van der Herten

• Website: https://freek.dev 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/freekmurze 

Freek Van der Herten is a PHP developer, Laravel enthusiast, and Spatie co-owner. Together with his colleagues from Spatie, Freek regularly releases PHP, Laravel and JavaScript packages, which have been downloaded more than 100 million times. Moreover, he is the author of one of the best blogs about PHP: Freek.dev, in which he shares his knowledge on JavaScript, Laravel, and of course, PHP.

He is also active on Twitter, where he often posts interesting photos and screenshots of his work.

11. Matt Stauffer 

• Website: https://mattstauffer.com/ 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/stauffermatt 

Matt Stauffer is a partner and technical director at Tighten. He is worth following because he shares his knowledge in various ways: he runs one of the top PHP blogs, speaks at conferences, records podcasts, and publishes videos on his YouTube channel. Moreover, Matt is also an author of the book: Laravel Up & Running.

He regularly adds posts on his Twitter account that are mostly related to Laravel.

12. Colin O'Dell

• Website: https://www.colinodell.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/colinodell 

The next PHP expert on our list is Colin O'Dell - a Director of Technology at Unleashed Technologies. He is an active member of the PHP League and a maintainer of the league/commonmark project. Colin is also the author of "PHP 7 Upgrade Guide" and an active PHP blogger.

Follow his Twitter if you like news from the PHP world, but also funny programming memes.

13. Matthias Noback

• Website: https://matthiasnoback.nl/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/matthiasnoback 

Matthias Noback is a professional web developer living in The Netherlands. He is the founder of Noback's Office - a training and consultancy company. Since 2011 he's been running his blog about all sorts of programming-related topics. Matthias is also the author of several books such as "Style Guide for Object Design" or "PHP for the Web". A few days ago, he published his new book called "Rector - The Power of Automated Refactoring".

On his blog, you will find new useful technical posts every month with lots of ready-to-use lines of code.

14. Paul M. Jones

• Website: http://paul-m-jones.com/ 
• Github: https://github.com/pmjones 

Paul M. Jones is a well-known PHP expert, lead developer on Aura for PHP and Solar Framework, and creator of the Savant template system. He is also an author of a series of authoritative benchmarks on dynamic framework performance and co-founder of the Zend Framework (the DB, DB_Table, and View components). Paul was a founding member of the PHP Framework Interoperability Group and the primary author on the PSR-4 autoloader recommendation. Since 2004, he has run his own PHP blog where he regulary publishes nee blogpost. You will find there both technical articles such as: “AutoRoute 2.0.0 Released, With Value Object Support” and soft such as: “Why Each Programmer Thinks He Is The Best”.

Read also: PHP vs Java – The Best Choice For Web Development

15. David Walsh

• Website: davidwalsh.name
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidwalshblog 

David Walsh is a Senior Software Engineer at MetaMask, Former Senior Software Engineer, evangelist for Mozilla, and creator of numerous MooTools plugins. He shares his experience on his blog where he writers about: AJAX, Canvas & SVG, CSS, SEO, Node.js, JavaScript, WordPress, PHP and many more. He is also speaker during many conferences and meetups such as London AJAX, AustinJS, BrazilJS, or Snow*Mobile.

On his Twitter feed, you'll find posts about PHP as well as everyday life.

16. Cal Evans

• Website: https://calevans.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/CalEvans 

Cal Evans is an essential personality in the PHP community. His everyday work focuses on helping to build the community, creating blog posts, podcasts, books, and technical talks. His main goal is to mentor and train the next generation of developers.  

Currently, Cal is working on projects like:

• Day Camp 4 Developers - a virtual conference for software developers
• Voices of the ElePHPant - a podcast presenting various members of the PHP community and showing interesting PHP projects.
• No BS Engineering - a podcast presenting many career advice to software developers.

Cal is another active Twitter member, who usually publishes Tweets more than once per day.

17. Rafael Dohms 

• Website: https://doh.ms/ 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/rdohms

Rafael Dohms is an experienced PHP Developer, conference speaker and contributor. He is an active member of the PHP community and the founder of 3 User Groups. He's passionate about open source, development and community. Although he has not published new PHP blog posts for a long time, he is still very active on Twitter, sharing fascinating insights and thoughts.

18. Brandon Savage

• Website: https://www.brandonsavage.net/ 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandonsavage 

Brandon Savage is an experienced software developer running his own consulting company in Olney. He is a frequent speaker at conferences such as OSCON, PHP UK, or ZendCon, and user groups like DC PHP or Baltimore PHP. Brandon is also the author of two books: Mastering Object Oriented PHP and Practical Design Patterns in PHP. He is very active on Twitter, where he shares a lot of thoughts related to programming, working, and our everyday life.

19. Adam Culp

• Website: https://geekyboy.com/ 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/adamculp 

Adam Culp is a software developer specializing in PHP, AWS, and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python). His passion is helping other developers learn more about technology. He actively helps to grow the PHP community in South Florida, where he organized the South Florida PHP Users Group (SoFloPHP), which now has around 1,100+ members. He is also an organizer of the SunshinePHP Developer Conference in Miami, whose primary goal is to help local PHP developers discover the benefits of the PHP community. 

Most of his Tweets are about his work as a PHP programmer, but there are also some general thoughts, such as on COVID-19 vaccination.

20. Chris Hartjes

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/grmpyprogrammer 

Chris Hartjes is a PHP and Python developer, tester, author, and conference speaker. He is focused on helping teams to produce fewer bugs in production, building tools, and introducing test-centric practices that deliver applications with fewer bugs faster into production. He wrote a book “The Grumpy Programmer's Guide To Testing PHP Applications”.

He is active on Twitter — not only publishes his own posts, but also shares interesting Tweets from other PHP experts.

Summary

Do you follow some other outstanding PHP experts who we didn't mention? Write to us. We'd be happy to expand the list!

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