What Is PHP?

If you have researched anything about building websites you will surely have come across ‘PHP’. As with many terms that have anything to do with technology, PHP is an acronym, but that in itself often confuses people. The reason for that confusion is that PHP does not stand for the same terminology as it once did. PHP once meant ‘Personal Home Page’ but in today’s world of website languages PHP is now an acronym for the words ‘PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor’.

Admittedly it could be argued that is not much clearer, but what we say to that is it is less important to know what the individual letters of PHP mean than to know what it is, what it can do, and what benefits it has for website designers, so let us explore those in more detail.

What Can Be Done With PHP

PHP is an open-source scripting language, that is widely used by those creating websites, and more to the point, it is extremely popular amongst those that use it. It was first introduced in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf who gave it the previously mentioned name of Personal Home Page.