A new homepage for php.net

A year ago I won the PHP Foundation's design contest for the PHP 8.5 release page; the results are in the Foundation's post Design Contest Results and Lessons Learned (5 November 2025). The Foundation shipped that design on the release page itself, but php.net kept its existing look, and the post noted that a wider homepage redesign might take a different approach.

This year I went further: a complete restyle of the php.net homepage, following the visual line of the 8.5 design. The code is here for the Foundation to use if they want to implement it.

Preview: nunoguerra.com/dev/php

What's inside

• index.php: the homepage, built around PHP 8.6 with a "Road to PHP 9" section
• docs.php: a documentation page in the same style
• includes/: header.php and footer.php shared by both pages, helpers.php (asset versioning and the code block) and icons.php with brand marks from Simple Icons
• assets/: stylesheet source and build (css/app.css → css/style.css), JavaScript, background videos and favicons

Every figure on the page (usage share, package counts, companies, Foundation numbers) was checked against a primary source in October 2026. Each one carries a dated comment in index.php next to the data it feeds, so it is easy to see what needs refreshing.

Running it

The compiled assets/css/style.css is committed, so any PHP server works:

php -S localhost:8000

To change styles, rebuild the stylesheet:

npm install
npm run dev     # watch
npm run build   # minified

Credits

Design and code by Nuno Guerra. Brand marks belong to their owners. Icons from Hugeicons (MIT) and Simple Icons (CC0).