When it comes to web development, PHP is the first language that we talk about. Its’ known as the most popular server-side scripting language in the world. According to w3techs, PHP is used by 81.9% of all the websites who uses server-side programming language. Moreover, PHP 7 is the major version of PHP which is 2 times faster than 5.6. There are many reason that you would choose PHP or hire PHP developers for your business over others languages. For instance: It has a large community of users and developers, support of different database, large open-source application and websites developed with PHP like WordPress, Drupal, and Facebook, works on almost every operating system and platform and much more.
If you are running a company that needs PHP developer or simple you want to start a business of web development with PHP, this article will guide you how and where to find expert developers. More than that, we will introduce you to some top PHP geeks, big communities, developer’s locations and best frameworks.
Why Should I Hire PHP Developers?
As mentioned earlier, PHP is taking almost 81% of the market. If you want to start a company in web design, web development, web application development or SaaS applications, PHP is the perfect choice. Additionally, PHP is one-fourth of the LAMP software stack, frameworks, and server software bundle used to engineer a web site’s back-end architecture. With a number of modern frameworks designed to leverage its speed and scalability, like Laravel, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, yii and the Zend framework, PHP has become a powerful programming language. Though many can reasonably claim to know PHP, those who are true experts in the language are capable of producing complex software that is much more scalable, functional, robust, and maintainable.
In addition, an experienced PHP programmer can develop and manage your CMS, server-side applications, enterprise application, website, or e-commerce platform.
How Can I Find PHP Developers?
Before you hire a PHP Developer, you must ask them about their location, typical work hours, any open source projects they have contributed to or maintained, previous work experience, regarding their education, yearly income and social profiles and some more which we will discuss later. In addition, you should ask them a list of responsibilities that they must do for you. This list depends on your project or company’s needs and requirements. Here is an example list.
- Maintaining existing features of product
- Assisting in contributing new features of applications
- Assisting with customer support for all products
- Researching new technologies that may be of benefit to your product or company
- Help resolve support issues and fix bugs in existing code
- And more…
Essential Requirement for Hiring PHP Developers
- OOP coding with proper design patterns
- MVC framework (Laravel, CodeIgniter, CakePHP)
- Version control,
- SOLID principles
- Working knowledge of relational databases
- Working knowledge of Unit Testing skills
- System Architecture design skills
- Trouble shooting skills
- API’s (REST, JSON, SOAP)
- HTML & CSS / SASS / LESS
- SEO knowledge
- Basic server management
- Excellent written communication (English)
- Customer support
Skills That Earn You Bonus Points
- Working knowledge of API design
- Vue / Angular
- Bash scripting
- Bootstrap or other frameworks
- Turning PSDs into clean HTML / CSS
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Open source contributions
- Passionate and initiative.
- Stays up to date with current tools, libraries and standards
- Knowledge of CMS (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla)
- Being a nice, friendly person
- And more… (if you have any)
Top PHP Frameworks and Big Communities
This section will introduce the top best PHP frameworks and their advantages with community, popularity and job offers. The only reason why we familiarize you to PHP frameworks is to make you aware of the best options possible for your business.
Laravel
Laravel is the number one and best PHP framework. It has change the whole PHP community and application developments. Over the past few years, I have tested a few PHP frameworks, but none of them attract me as much as Laravel did. There are many reason you would want to hire a developer with knowledge of Laravel, but there are a few main reasons.
- Building an Authentication and Authorization Systems
- Integration with Mail Services
- Powerful SaaS application scaffolding with Spark
- Integration with Tools for Making Web Applications Faster
- Fixing the Most Common Technical Vulnerabilities
- Big and Active Community
- Configuration Error and Exception Handling
- Automation Testing Work
- URL Routing Configuration
- Separation “Business Logic Code” from “Presentation Code”
- Message Queue System (Delayed Delivery) Configuration
- Scheduling Tasks Configuration and Management
- And Much more.
CodeIgniter
Codeigniter is another popular PHP framework which is develop using most famous architectural the MVC design pattern and its consider by lots of companies as a most user-friendly framework for small to large scale project. CodeIgniter is easy to install and get going, but it has less pre-made components to speed up your development work-flow. The community is a little inactive. It has been around for a long time and there are many companies still use it. All in all, the only thing I can say about CodeIgniter is this that, it’s fast, it has very good documentation but it’s like a grandfather of PHP Frameworks.
Yii
Yii is easy and fast development framework. It back by good number of community support. Yii has support excellent caching system, Security with validation, Unit Test, RBAC and many more. Its popularity for most of PHP developers is due to its features like fast development, caching, authentication and role-based access control, scaffolding, testing, etc.
Symfony
Symfony is a stable PHP framework widely used by PHP developers to create websites and web applications. It is a flexible, scalable yet powerful PHP framework. It has a huge community of Symfony fans committed to take PHP to the next level. Symfony has plenty of reusable PHP components that can be used like Security, Templating, Translation, Validator, Form Configuration and more. Beside that all, Laravel also uses Symfony Component in the core framework codes.
Who is the winner?
Actually, we can’t say you should change your business community to Symfony or Laravel or wise versa. If you are starting a business from scratch, without any favoritism, we would suggest you Laravel. Here is the graph by google that shows how laravel Community is growing up.
Where to Find and Hire PHP Developers?
Coming to final destination, how and where you can hire php developers? By now, I hope you can select which types of developer you need and which is best for your business. Finding PHP developer is easy but knowing whether they are expert or not is the hard part. There are simple tips that will help you recognize their expertise.
- Ask them what they have done so far.
- Ask their biggest PHP project they have completed.
- Ask their contribution on Open-Source projects.
- Look how much contribution they have on gitbub.
It doesn’t really matter how many certificates they have. But it matters how much contribution, activity, and complex project they have produced so far.
Top Best Resources to Find Expert PHP developers
I can say, stack overflow the number 1 top resource for developers. You can find and hire PHP developers based on their activity and reputation they have earned.
I believe 100% of developers have github account. You can find how much they are expert by their contribution to open source project and their own project popularity.
LinkedIn is generally the best place to look for and hire PHP developers are also there.
Laracast is a great resource for learning Laravel. Beside that, they have a great community with php developers that you can hire.
Top Expert PHP Developers
Rasmus Lerdorf. Creator of PHP.
Blog
Twitter
GitHub
Taylor Otwell. Created Laravel.
Blog
Twitter
GitHub
Matthew Weier O’Phinney. Open-source software architect. Project lead for Zend Framework. Zend-certified engineer and member of the Zend Education Advisory Board. Speaker and writer.
Blog
Twitter
Ohloh
Jordi Boggiano. Lead developer on Composer. Symfony2 developer. Partner at Nelmio.
Blog
Twitter
GitHub
Dries Buytaert. Original creator and project lead of Drupal. President of the Drupal Association. Co-founder and CTO at Acquia.
Blog
Twitter
Jeffrey Way. Creator of Laracast.
Sebastian Bergmann. PHP quality assurance pioneer. Creator of the PHPUnit test framework and co-founder of thePHP.cc.
Blog
Twitter
GitHub
Conclusion
All in all, it was just a comprehensive guide-line from finding to hire PHP developers. You must remember that their is no expert developer until the have any big project or big contribution to others projects. Only their experience and portfolios can revel how much expert they are. We hope this article help you find your best developer you need. If you have any question regarding this top, feel free to comment it bellow. 🙂
