Largest / Most Commercial PHP driven sites

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m3mn0n
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Post by m3mn0n »

I believe Flickr, digg, & delicious are PHP powered. They do tens of millions of views a month.

Also, @ big-boards.com you can see a list of the biggest forum communities on the web.

The biggest one, Gaia, runs a heavily modded phpBB forum. They got something like 5.2million registered accounts and 865 million posts.
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Burrito
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Post by Burrito »

I guess what I was looking for in this thread was more 'commercial' web sites. As I said a few posts back, I know I've seen one credit card company or bank that uses it. But I'm looking more for sites like airlines, banks, credit cards, large stores, restaraunts, etc. It just seems to me that those types of 'organizations' are choosing different language paths... primarily .net. Perhaps this is due to the framework and ease of development of .net sites and the integration they could have with offline windows apps that access the same data, I really don't know, but I do know that PHP seems to NOT be the language of choice for those larger-than-enterprise projects and that is somewhat telling.

This is not a bash against PHP by any stretch of the imagination as I think it's fully capable of performing and in some cases even outperforming the aforementioned, it's just a wake-up call to me more than anything else...
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Post by nickvd »

I think alot of it has to do with the corporate support that msft provides with their languages... If you're a fortune 500 company, you have the money to pay for "proper" support, whereas with php, there really isn't any "from-the-horses-mouth" support (as far as i know)...
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Luke
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Post by Luke »

nickvd wrote:I think alot of it has to do with the corporate support that msft provides with their languages... If you're a fortune 500 company, you have the money to pay for "proper" support, whereas with php, there really isn't any "from-the-horses-mouth" support (as far as i know)...
that is a very good point
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Chris Corbyn
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Post by Chris Corbyn »

Same reason a lot of companies will "pay" for a red hat license or use oracle DBMS over MySQL. Support; quite true.
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Luke
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Post by Luke »

but then again Zend does handle a lot of php's commercial aspects
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RobertGonzalez
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Post by RobertGonzalez »

nickvd wrote:I think alot of it has to do with the corporate support that msft provides with their languages... If you're a fortune 500 company, you have the money to pay for "proper" support, whereas with php, there really isn't any "from-the-horses-mouth" support (as far as i know)...
This is why my company is paying for RHEL licenses, RH Application Stack licenses and several other licenses. My old company would not use anything that did not come with an expensive, responsive license. In fact, they said that if the open source platforms had solid and reliable support for each component that could be used, they would go with it over Microsoft.

However, I will say that there are a lot of organizations, from commercial businesses to government agencies, that are moving to an open source platform for their entire enterprise. In fact, I think the state of Virginia (I am totally not certain about which state, but I think it is Virginia) has moved to a Linux OS for all state agency offices and all business applications. So the use of the tools ( and more specifically the language) is out there. But where... well, that is a little harder to determine I think.

EDIT | I found this link from the Usage Stats portion of PHP.net. I know this is not what you want, but it might help spur the search.
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Post by matthijs »

Which platforms are used by the bigger companies has more to do with culture, history and other factors, not so much the language itself, I think. Just the fact that .Net is sold by more expensive companies, with expensive licenses with expensive support is reason enough for some companies to go for that instead of other - cheaper - options. People in the higher levels of a company who take the decisions about what route to take probably have little idea what the different programming platforms/languages are. They just decide on the basis of who or what they trust more.

I think if "we" mere php code junkies want to work with the big guys, we should get out of our cellars and go play golf on the most expensive golf court around and become friends with the guys with the big money :)
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m3mn0n
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Post by m3mn0n »

Burrito wrote:I guess what I was looking for in this thread was more 'commercial' web sites. As I said a few posts back, I know I've seen one credit card company or bank that uses it. But I'm looking more for sites like airlines, banks, credit cards, large stores, restaraunts, etc. It just seems to me that those types of 'organizations' are choosing different language paths... primarily .net. Perhaps this is due to the framework and ease of development of .net sites and the integration they could have with offline windows apps that access the same data, I really don't know, but I do know that PHP seems to NOT be the language of choice for those larger-than-enterprise projects and that is somewhat telling.

This is not a bash against PHP by any stretch of the imagination as I think it's fully capable of performing and in some cases even outperforming the aforementioned, it's just a wake-up call to me more than anything else...
Yeah, quite interesting.

But with the Microsoft/Zend deal of a little while back, that's surely going to change.

Now that PHP will be able to perform even better on Microsoft servers, I see it's usage in the future and the whole environment around it's usage being more friendly and appealing to large businesses.


BTW... Facebook is another PHP-powered site that I've heard has like like a bazillion people on it. :P
The site is used by over 12.5 million people at over 2,200 universities, 22,000 high schools, and 2,000 companies around the world.
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CoderGoblin
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Post by CoderGoblin »

You also have to bear in mind the mentality of management... Free things mean not good.... More expensive means better. Same as Version 1.0 means has bugs...
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Jenk
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Post by Jenk »

The adverts akin to IBM's 'e' marketing, and Microsoft's old Active Directory adverts speak a truer word than ever. They all involve some techies explaining to the managers about how the new hardware/software will save minutes per call, will reduce power consumption by 20%, will reduce the workload by 50% etc. etc. then the manager will just look blankly at the techies and they will then just say "It will save us 2 million a year" and a party breaks out. They don't even want to hear that the project will need a 10 million initial funding budget, and if anything doesn't go to plan it will double.

I was once involved in a proposal meeting for a big project my employers were going to undertake. I was (and still am) only an apprentice, so I was literally supposed to only take minutes to document the meeting. However, I ended up getting really involved in the discussion regarding choice of technology. The 'experts' (read: people with 30year careers who are absolutely petrified of change) would speak their normal blurb and refuse to budge. The project was to involve a web based tool for the help desk. I recommended PHP for the intermediate (helpdesk <-> support groups) tool. When asked to explain my "ridiculous" suggestion, I explained that PHP is low maintenance, easy to control [changes] and implementation is a doddle. Then when asked about support, I told them it will be in house support. I got a hearty gaffaw from most of them, which I stamped out pretty quickly by reminding them that the $250,000 support contract they were paying for the existing bespoke software, would easily cover a small teams salary - and they would get improvements and customisations absolutely free, and under our own complete control.

"That's just not cricket" was the response I got, and we implemented the bespoke software which we have had no end of trouble with, and the project has made a loss due to costs involved with getting this bespoke software updated for our, and our clients needs. We lost the contract not long after implementation. :roll:

*sigh* if only I was the chief. Everything would be perfect and I would be sitting on a mountain of cash :lol:
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m3mn0n
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Post by m3mn0n »

lol... yeah, if only
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BDKR
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Post by BDKR »

Yahoo is using it in places, but most of it's stuff is still Perl / MySQL / FreeBSD.

However, there are a number of successful companies that are using it now. I'm not talking about household name companies, but very
successful still. If you look at the trend (I've payed more attention to it in this latest job search), younger companies seem to be picking
up PHP as a viable technology while those that have been around a while longer don't see a reason to change.

I don't blame them either.

Anyway, you'll begin to see more and more big name sites powered by PHP in the future. The trend is in that direction.
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