Here we’ll discuss 10 important factors as for why you should choose Drupal web development services for building business sites. Let’s start.

Flexible Payment Modes:

With Drupal, you can achieve your desired needs from your e-commerce sites because this platform provides full freedom in choosing payment modes and also allows you to build multiple payment modes or gateways as per your requirement.

Can Set Versatile Price Slabs:

Drupal is fantastic because it simplifies the whole process of enticing customers. It will also facilitate you to set price slabs for the overseas customers on account of location, product type, packaging and more.

Products Features:

It is trendy to highlight popular and the most selling items on your online store and with Drupal, you can do it real easily. Through this way, you can grab the attention of your customers for the most in-demand products online. It is an ingenious approach to Drupal Development.

Protected Page Module With Secure Checkout & Login:

The secure page is an e-commerce module that gives opportunity and ensures different simple ways to implement few primary example matching. If SSL certification is installed on your business website, then search any organization structure of module to design fully secured web pages. Depending on the module which you uses to enhance the functionality of your business site.

Control SEO, CRO & Website Analytics Easily:

Drupal gives the only single system to work so it is really easy to control the website analytics, SEO and conversion rates optimization (CRO) that is onerous with two systems. Along with this, customer journey optimization is also simpler because it has one journey despite two with the bridge.

Role Management & Great Community Feature:

The role and use feature of Drupal allow the access to use the functionality for any online store. Customers can also use this option to control features. It also consists a myriad of lucrative community features for online business owners which can help in attracting maximum customers in the loop and make them engaged. This amazing feature will no doubt repeat sales for a lifetime.

Integrate External System:

With RESTful API you can extend, enhance the functionality of Drupal platform with external systems for your online business store. This amazing functionality is also available in Drupal Commerce with the 3rd party system.

Order Management Tools:

You can manage, update, and view all the orders on your online store through the Drupal administration tool set. Or can even send update notifications with the Drupal order management tools.

No Premium Plugins / Modules:

There is no such existence of premium plugins or modules in Drupal community. Drupal commerce is basically an open-source and free-to-use software which consists no module or plugin.

WYSIWYG Editorial Manager:

WYSIWYG functionality powered mainly by Drupal brings out numerous reasons to include it in your site. Edit this editorial manager on setting structure and ensures that it represents your online store payment settings and contacts. One thing you should need to make sure is to change settings of editorial manager because no single procedures fit all sizes modules.

Conclusion

All the above-mentioned points make Drupal a cutting edge platform for creating any business website. These points no doubt justify as for why you should choose Drupal Website Development services to create the business site.

Ecommerce web design with Magento is very comfortable. For that first of all you have to setup Magento on your system so that you can further develop e-commerce website with Magento. To set up:

1. Go to System > Cache Management > Disable.
2. Next, you have to enable Logging settings. To do that go to System > Configuration > Advanced > Developer > and head over to Log Settings. Now choose the Enabled option, and the logging setting will get enabled allowing you to do Magento custom development.
3. Magento development services provide us the service of SEO. To enable the SEO setting again go to System > Configuration and head over to The Web and Search Engine Optimization. Now check the Yes option for the Use Web Server Rewrites.
4. Next action is to configure the reindex management. Navigate to  System > Index Management and choose Reindex all.
5. To enable the Developer Mode go to .htaccess and add the following line of code at the end: etEnv MAGE_IS_DEVELOPER_MODE “true.”
6. Within <IfModule mod_php5.c> tag add  php_value display_errors On  in .htaccess
7. Locate /errors/local.xml.sample and now rename it to /errors/local.xml.

Never Edit Core Files

Some Common mistakes in Magento development that developers make is that they edit the core files while doing custom Magento development. The first rule of Magento development practice is never to alter those core files of the Magento platform if you want to achieve any functionality you can use any Magento extensions.

The only solution that Magento ecommerce development provides is to edit “Shipping.php” file located at “appcodecoreMageShippingModelShipping.php.” You have two options you can alter the same file here, or you can make a new file of the same name and then after editing you can copy and then paste it in the following path.

This trick works if you want to do any Magento custom development without altering the core files. So next time when you will upgrade your Magento platform, those files will get overwrite because Magento always looks for files in a local directory that is (app code local)  before looking for a file in the core directory.

Turn on Template Path Hints

If e-commerce website development with Magento is the new thing to you, then you surely can realize some hassle while understanding the logic behind the file structure and block structure of a Magento layout when you try to customize the storefront. Magento development services provide you the solution so that you can enjoy while developing with Magento. Magento has the best feature that helps you by displaying hints showing where the different files of your layout are. So using this feature it would be easy for you to locate them you can edit them.

But to access this feature, you have to enable it so that Magento ecommerce development will get easy for you. Follow these steps.

1. To access it you have to log in to your administration panel.
2. Now next step is to navigate to System > Configuration.
3. Now find “Current Configuration Scope” from the left navigation column on top.
4. Select “Main Website” from the drop down menu.
5. Now go to Developer > Advance at the left navigation column.
6. Here you can see Template Path Hints under  “Debug” just select Yes.
7. Hit Save Config button.

After that you have done the above configurations on your Magento system you will see some red boxes on your storefront. These red boxes are underlying structure of the pages regarding templates and blocks.

PS: Only use this trick when you are in a development environment. Otherwise, your storefront would look hideous with big red blocks everywhere.

Best GUI for Magento Development

Ecommerce web design with Magento can be more lovely if you use JetBrainfs PhpStorm. It is a Php editor that ‘understands’ your code and its structure. Thus provides full support for all PHP language features for modern and legacy projects. The other features of PhpStorm are:

• PHP 5.5 support
• Improved PHP syntax coloring
• Vagrant, SSH console & remote tools
• Support for Magento frameworks
• Debugging and testing improvements

Best Magento Plugins for Magento Developers

If Magento programmers want to choose best Magento development practices to make Magento e-commerce development easy and more catchy, than you can use Magicento is a PHPStorm plugin for Magento developers. Some of the features are:

• • Goto and autocomplete for factories
  • Goto for template paths
  • XML files
  • Class names
  • Documentation for XML nodes
  • Inside Magento environment evaluation of PHP code
  • And much more to have!

Best Magento Development Environment

Magento e-commerce developers love you to use XAMPP for Magento Development Environment.XAMPP is free and easy to install Apache server. It contains MySQL, PHP, MariaDB, and Perl. XAMPP is an open source package that is very easy to install and to use. You can download it from the official site so you can start Magento custom development.

Remember!! XAMPP setup is necessary to be installed on your system before you start working on e-commerce website development with Magento.

Chatfuel, an ideal chatbot creator for the business pages on facebook. Chatfuel will guide and help you in building your own chatbot without any knowledge needed for the coding. The additional feature in chatfuel is the easy navigation steps to guide the consumers in a more friendly way. Chatfuel is catering over 7 million users globally and is used by some world-renowned websites like Uber, National geographic and Techcrunch. Around 230,000 chatbots are created by chatfuel for different industries.

Smooch:

Smooch behaves and acts like a connector or a bridge between the business apps like slack, zendesk, and others and between the messaging apps too like line, Facebook messenger, WeChat, and others. Smooch forwards all your incoming chat notifications from the messages apps to your business apps. Through this, you can answer the chat questions of your customers even without the business apps.

Beep Boop:

Beep Boop is modern paid to host chatbot builders which are specifically for Facebook messenger or Slack. Set up the bot source code on Github, launch it on Beep Boop and integrate it with any of the messaging apps. The Beep Boop chatbot is used for Facebook business pages to interact with customers via real chat, can answer their questions and can guide them through transactions.

Microsoft Bot Framework:

Microsoft Bot Framework has its own platform for creating chatbots which not only offers conversation but also attachment options. Microsoft Bot Framework can build chatbots for Skype, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Office 365, email and more. The framework offers chatbot builders with SDKs for Node.js and.Net platform. The framework has its Bot directory which has an impressive collection of pre-built bots.

Botsify:

Botsify is another chatbot creator tool mainly for Facebook Messenger. Botsify has simple to use interface which lets business owners build their own chatbot without any coding. This tool has Facebook Messenger API which offers features that help developers to configure personalized responses, align messages, integrate with WordPress and also can pull data from data analytics tool. Botsify also supports media contents like audio, images and video files.

Pandorabots:

Pandorabots is web-based tools and services which allow to host and create chatbots.  With this tool, you can create AI based chatbots for customer services, IOT interfaces, advertising, games and more. Pandorabots has a large online community of 225k+ developers and more than 285k+ chatbots are created by this platform. The platform has also a tool called AIaaS (Artificial Intelligence as a Service) which is a RESTful API for accessing the bot hosting platform and integrating chatbot into the web and mobile applications.

Motion AI:

Motion AI is the platform for enterprises to create and deploy chatbots for Facebook Messenger, Slack, Email,  Web, and SMS. The platform has free plans as well as premium plans. It also has documentation to help you creating a chatbot easily. Motion AI also has a bot store to allow developers to share their chatbots with others.

Conclusion.

Chatbots are unique and latest way to interact with the users and offer them your services. The popularity of chatbots is growing at a fast pace. Chatbot expert Murray Newlands said that “Where 10 years ago every company needed a website and five years ago every company needed an app, now every company needs to embrace messaging with AI and chatbots”

Learning PHP is usually the first step in programming for the web. Its importance needs no explanation but just to let you know, the world’s top websites like Facebook, Google, Wikipedia and YouTube runs PHP script on their backends. It is undoubtedly the most popular programming language and whoever plans on jumping into the world of programming must learn it.

If you are starting to learn PHP, there is an ocean of learning materials but we can help save your time by finding the right material for you. We have selected some of the best PHP coding books that will transform you into a skilled professional from a complete novice in no time.

Before listing the top PHP books for learning, here’s a little orientation of PHP itself.

What is PHP?

Introduced by Rasmus Lerdorf, it stands for Hypertext Pre-processor.

It is an open source, server-side scripting language which is easy to learn and can run on different operating systems such as Windows, LINUX, UNIX, and more. PHP can create static as well as dynamic websites and web applications. It not only connects the form data but also creates, reads, writes, closes, and deletes files on the server.

PHP Programming Books

Learning PHP programming or developing PHP applications is not difficult. There are plenty of tutorials and detailed courses that can provide you a lot of useful insight on PHP. Also, there several print books that you can purchase to learn about the programming language.

Here are the few best books that will broaden your knowledge of PHP programming.

Programming PHP: Creating Dynamic Web Pages

Author: Rasmus Lerdorf

Programming PHP is an excellent resource for beginners. It works quite well for them as it covers all the concepts rather than minute details which helps build up a strong foundation. It is a 540-page-long book especially recommended for people who are new to backend coding. The first chapter of the book covers all the basics of server-side code. This introductory book comes handy to pockets and a great investment if you want a detailed introduction of the PHP language

Modern PHP

Author:  Josh Lockhart

If you are looking for a detailed beginner book, unlike the typical ones, Modern PHP is the right one for you. It covers everything with great details whether they are namespaces, objects, classes, or security concerns. If you know how to Google your questions correctly, then Modern PHP is looking to up your game right away. It is a definite yes for beginners. Besides, the intermediate-level coders can also make the most of it because there are many topics in the book that go deeper than the level of beginners.

If you want to build a custom SaaS app or just editing a WordPress framework, this book is the right pick for you as it will help you learn whatever you need and give you the in-depth information of everything you need to learn.

Learning PHP 7

Author: Antonio Lopez

PHP 7 is the latest version of PHP language which is all set to improve speed and performance on all servers. PHP 7 is only about restructuring with the backend and how objects, classes and memories are handled and does not have any major changes code-wise.

With this book, you can dive into the world of PHP 7 and can get a grip over all the concepts and coding techniques. Not to forget, it is a beginner’s book and shouldn’t be a choice of semi-experienced coders.  There are exercises given which are simple to follow.  Learning PHP 7 will make learning fun for the programmers.

The Joy of PHP Programming: A Beginner’s Guide

Author: Alan Forbes

For a lighter introduction of PHP, Joy of PHP Programming is the apt choice. As the name best describes it, the book is for absolute beginners to catch up quickly. Alan Forbes’ book has a very practical stance for learning PHP. It starts with some basic HTML and goes step-by-step as to how PHP actually works with a series of close-knit and fun-filled exercises.

The book provides great information on PHP and MYSQL. After completing the book, one can read, write and modify PHP scripts and can make one’s own dynamic websites.

PHP & MYSQL Novice to Ninja

Author: Kevin Yank

This book will give a solid ground on both PHP and MYSQL in the most convenient and readable manner. In this book, you can learn and explore some important and useful PHP elements such as regular expression/session management.  It is highly recommended for beginners. Moreover, PHP & MYSQL contains an excellent chapter on structured programming.

This book is really good for beginners because it’s well-written, engaging and covers the basics of PHP and MYSQL.

Head First PHP & MYSQL

Author: Lynn Beighley & Michael Morrison

Head First PHP & MYSQL is the ultimate learning guide to building dynamic and database-driven websites. It is an 800-page-long book and contains wide-ranging topics, basic and advanced, on PHP and MYSQL coding such as form validation, cookies, database queries, file I/O operation, content management, and more. It is undoubtedly one of the best books for beginners.

Learning PHP, MYSQL, JavaScript, CSS & HTML5

Author: Robin Nixon

This book is the second edition of the top-selling guide to the web development. This latest edition is easier to follow and has a large amount of information.

You can practice whatever you learn from this book with the review questions given at the end of each chapter. The book also describes a sample social networking platform built with the help of elements introduced in the book.

PHP and MYSQL Web Development

Author: Luke Welling & Laura Thompson

The book is a complete guide as to how to make use of the PHP tools to create interactive and effective web applications. Every chapter in the book explains PHP from the beginning to the end and instantly moves over to MySQL. It explains the basics of the PHP language and how to set up MYSQL database. It also tells how PHP interacts with the database.
The book also contains excellent examples that demonstrate common PHP tasks. This book is, simply put, a crash course of PHP.

The PHP & MYSQL: The Missing Manual

Author: Brett McLaughlin

This book will take you to the next level in PHP programming. Reading this book will help you learn the management of content, creation of the database and interaction with users.
The book’s step-by-step tutorials will broaden your knowledge on server-side programming

PHP: A Beginner’s Guide

Author: Vikram Vaswani

PHP: A Beginner’s Guide will help you understand how to write basic PHP programs with more advanced features such as MYSQL database integration, XML input, and third-party extensions.

Although it works well for beginners, I personally think it is also appropriate for intermediate-level learners because it covers sufficient information on software installations, language syntax, flow control routines, data structures, and built-in functions.

Never Quit Learning

Anyone who is unknown to the world of PHP Programming can get started from any of the aforementioned books. They are for beginners who want to develop PHP websites and applications and excel into the world of PHP programming.

Read Here 20 Best Websites for Learning PHP Programming

Twice as fast as PHP 5, PHP 7 can surely compete with modern competitors such as Facebook’s Hip Hop Virtual Machine (HHVM). PHP 7 also offers fast performance to the Drupal users with the additional benefit of not using a virtual machine to execute the PHP code. One more key advantage of PHP 7 is that when it runs on WordPress 4.1.1, it can execute twice as many requests per second as the same WordPress platform running PHP 5.6.

Developers should familiarize themselves with the technical changes appear in PHP 7 if they are intending to upgrade to PHP 7  for web development projects.

Scalar Type Hints & Return Type:

Developers like to declare a return type for the function or method. But by default, PHP 7 allows developers to declare what kind of return type function is expected to return a value. This means that now programmers can specify the type of variable that a function should return. In PHP 7, the return type is defined after closing parenthesis of the argument list.

function f1(): array {
return [];
}

This is an example of PHP 7 which declares the function “f1” that returns an array. Whereas, in PHP 5.6, programmers cannot specify the return type which makes it impossible for anyone reading the code that what the function “f1” is about.

Declaring the return type makes the code much easier to read while debugging your own code or working on the code of someone else.

Spaceship Operator:

PHP 7 introduced a new operator called spaceship operator ( < = > )or combined comparison operator. This operator mostly used in sorting and combined comparison. It works like strcmp() or version_compare ()

Before PHP7:

function order_func($a, $b)
{
return ($a < $b) ? -1 : (($a > $b) ? 1 : 0);
}

After PHP7:

function order_func($a, $b)
{
return $a <=> $b;
}

This is one of the beautiful addition in this latest PHP version which can be used to quickly and conveniently compare two expressions. The operators can be used as follows:
a < = > b

• f a is less than b, the expression output would be  -1
• If a is equal to b, the expression output  would be   0
• If a is greater than b, the expression output would be  1

Additional Features

Apart from the above-mentioned changes, there are some other modifications added into PHP7. Here is the list.

• Error handling replaced with object oriented exceptions. This change will help developers to track and fix the bugs in their code.
• The syntax for the foreach statement has changed.
• No more comments in INI file. Instead of putting a # symbol with the comment, use “;” semi-colon.
•  In PHP 5.6, the bug which makes the switch statement to have multiple default classes is now fixed.
• The list () operator doesn’t support string anymore.

How to Migrate From PHP 5 to PHP 7?

PHP 7 is the most significant update that has affected PHP in more than a decade. However, upgrading your existing code with PHP 7 might come with few challenges. But the reward would be much faster performance and less demand on the web servers.

The things you need to make sure before switching to PHP 7 firstly make sure the libraries that the PHP project uses are available for PHP 7.

If the libraries are supported by PHP 7 then you may need to hold off the upgrading for a while or check if it’s possible to remove the dependency on those libraries.

If the code is written in PHP 5.5 or 5.6, then upgrading to PHP 7 will be real easy. However, if you are using PHP 4, then there will be some syntax changes you need to be aware of. For example, the constructor functions in PHP 4 are no longer supported in PHP7.

While upgrading to PHP 7, ensures that your code includes unit and integration tests. These tests should identify any issues with your applications before they pop up as bugs on live screen.

Conclusion.

PHP 7 performances advantages mean that it is going to play a key role in the future of Web Development. Many popular websites developing platforms such as WordPress allows its users to easily upgrade to the new PHP version to experience much better services.

Read here: Top Questions to ask from a Professional PHP Development Company

There are many advance features in Drupal and it has easy to use admin interface. The built-in generation tool  makes it one of the most favorite CMS for website developers and owners.

But wait, how can you be so sure that Drupal could be a right choice for your e-commerce solution?

Well, here are some pros and cons of Drupal e-commerce website to consider. Read on:

Pros of Drupal E-commerce Website:

•         Build Complex Site Rapidly.
•         Better Scalability
•         Serve the API
•         Start with Blank Slate
•         Large Supportive Community.

Some More Advantages of Drupal E-commerce Website:

1: Free and open source code. The real fact is, its CMS is completely free allowing it to compete with other similar products like Joomla and WordPress. In addition, Drupal system code is open, which let the user rebuild it according to their needs.

2: Drupal was originally developed with the idea that only professional will be using it. It is the major advantages of this system and distinguishing it from its major competitors.

3: Plenty of room for creativity with the Drupal CMS. Drupal web developers can help creating resources, ignoring the differences between the complex and original designs.

4: Fast speed. Comparing it with other CMS, due to the built-in caching, Drupal has the best speed.

5: Rich source of modules. Since the source code is open, Drupal open source CMS got the ability to improve and extend the functionality by adding additional modules in it.

6: With the availability of built-in queries, forums, and multi-blogs, any project created from Drupal gets a good start.

7: Full Security. Other than the free competitors, Drupal security is very high. It has increased its protection more and cannot be broken down so easily.

8: Large professional online community. Although there are several fans of Joomla and WordPress, but the online community of Drupal CMS has the largest number of professional programmers.

The above-mentioned advantages and pros of Drupal CMS allow comfortable working with the structure and content of the site and quickly adapted possibilities of the CMS coding for the specific needs of the customer’s website.

Create your e-commerce site on Drupal to experience the full potential of a website.

Cons of Drupal E-commerce Website:

•         Difficult to Learn
•         Trouble in Upgrading
•         Can Consume many of the Resources
•         Not a Good Platform for Custom Install
•         Module Compatibility can be Bad

Some More Disadvantages of Drupal E-commerce Website:

1: Difficulty in familiarization. The development and promotion of a Drupal e-commerce can be difficult for any newbie web developer.

2: Advanced Interface. The professional construction system of Drupal can make it difficult to master. Due to the complex interface, Drupal CMS is not very intuitive.

3:  High System Requirements. Before switching to Drupal CMS, be prepare for paying an extra hosting fee and forget cheap fares.

4: Lack of High-Quality Design in the Free version. Most users of the system are engaged in self-development designs. This leads them to the shortage of quality topics for their site design.

5: Problems occurred while installation of updates and program modules. Drupal can be complicated for developers who had worked on simple CMS as the installation of updates and additional modules in Drupal, is made through FTP.

A certain stiffness of Drupal is often an advantage but admittedly, can also be a disadvantage. The above-listed downsides of Drupal CMS can make the system inconvenient.

Final Verdict.

Drupal is no doubt a great choice for ecommerce development. However, due to the complexity and the above-mentioned pros and cons of Drupal, it may not be the best choice for everyone. In a nutshell, Drupal e-commerce solution allows the developers to make feature-rich, high-quality websites which will fulfill all the requirements of the clients.

The second most important feature of Magento 2.x is less abandoned carts and increased conversions. Another feature which encourages the online customers to revisit your e-commerce site is, at checkout, a default guest checkout screen will appear to enter the email address. If it matches with any of the existing customers then they will be provided with an option to check out faster with their saved information.

A guest visitor on your website can create an account in one click from the order Thank You page.

Key Integrations:

Magento 2.x integrates a lot of popular extension for the better functionality of any Magento ecommerce store. These includes the payment gateways like Paypal and Braintree, making a lot more easy for Magneto 2 developers to integrate any of the payment platforms on their Magento store.

The benefit of Magento 2 is, it is also integrated with Worldpay and Cybersource to increase the payment security.

New Admin Interface:

A better new interface in Magento 2 will reduce the time managing the online store. In Magento 2, admin can customize the admin panel for important business information to be accessed quickly. It will result in personalized admin panel for each user to increase the productivity when managing products, order and customer data.

You can import products 4x faster in the upgraded version of Magento. The admin interface in Magento 2 includes drag and drop layout editing that means you do not extensive coding to modify your Magento store’s online appearance.

Mobile Responsive:

Magento 2 is more mobile friendly. Mobile responsiveness improves sales as customers prefer shopping online from their smartphones. Keeping it in mind, Magento team made mobile responsiveness a key feature to introduce in the core Magento 2 platform.

Magento 2 comes with responsive, SEO friendly designed themes, integrated video, and easier checkout, improving the look and function of your Magento stores on small screen devices, thus, increase mobile sale.

Bonus Benefit: The additional benefit of Magento 2, is its admin panel is also touch screen friendly, helping you manage the store on the go.

But…..Change is not easy to Adapt!

Magento 2 has not become popular much. But customers are steadily moving towards this new platform. This is because several factors are contributing to this like Magento 1 users do not want to revamp or rebuild their existing Magento site, they are comfortable and happy with the Magento 1 and the last factor Magento 2 extensions are not enough.

Time to Upgrade the Magento Version

So, now you know the benefits and advantages of upgrading from Magento 1 to Magento 2 It’s high time to start planning the upgrade timeline by documenting the business needs, requirements and goals for Magento 2.

Final Thoughts

For all Magento store owners, it’s the time to give your customers the benefits this year with the Magento 2 new features and beautifully coded extension upgrades.

Sandy Smith

A  PHP developer from 15 years and loves to do Career Management and Career Planning . He lives in Washington DC. He loves to work for both in-house and in agencies. He had worked with hundred of organizations.

He is a Senior Software Engineer, Innovations At Truth Initiative, CEO of php[architect] from Jan 2013 – Present (4 yrs 1 month) and Founding Partner & CEO Musketeers.me from Aug 2012 – Present and worked in other organizations as well.

Kevin Bruce

The third in the list is Kevin Bruce the sole Designer/Front End Developer working in the band of developers called musketeers.me. He has experience of over 20 years as a Web Designer and a Web Developer.

He runs a local design meet-up and is a national speaker who loves addressing  in tech conferences. The evangelist of clean design and clean code is now working as a Web Applications Developer at  Yakabod, Inc. from Dec 2016 – Present.

Fabien Potencier

Fabien Potencier, the founder of Symfony Framework, has completed his studies from HEC School of Management in 1997 .He started his own company in France in June 1998 and named it Sensio, but later shifted the company to Canada in 2008 and then in the US. In 2005 he got the license of his framework, Symfony.

Brandon Savage

A software Developer with more than ten years experience. He worked on a project namely,  Socorro, which is the Firefox’s crash collection and analysis system.

Brandon is certified, private pilot. He is both a national and an international speaker and has spoken at many conferences like OSCON, PHP UK, ZendCon and user groups like DC PHP and Baltimore PHP. Check out Mastering Object Oriented PHP and Practical Design Patterns in PHP.

Adam Culp

Adam Culp- PHP Certified Engineer is the Senior Professional Services Consultant at Zend Technologies from Apr 2013 – Present. He is a public speaker and a trainer and is the organizer of SoFloPHP and SunshinePHP Developer Conference.

Derick Rethans

He is a mapping enthusiast, a PHP internals expert and author of Xdebug, php|architect’s Guide to Date and Time Programming  and an OpenStreetMap and co-author of PHP 5 Power Programming.

He is the PHP Engineer/Evangelist at MongoDB and worked on the PHP and HHVM drivers for MongoDB. He frequently gives lectures at conferences, In his spare time, he likes to travel, hike, ski and practise photography.

Sebastian Bergmann

He is the co-founder of thePHP.cc Information Technology and Services. His test framework PHPUnit is a de-facto standard. He is Co-Founder and Managing Director at BBP Consulting & Publishing GmbH from Jul 2015 – Present in Hamburg, Germany. He shares his experience and knowledge through his widely-read books and articles. Sebastian love to hack on Open Source Software and loves to take photographs when he is free.

Eli White

Eli White loves to write code in PHP, and also an author at eliw.com and a speaker. He does conferences for a living. He is a vivid gamer , loves to play Xbox. And in free time he loves to do Medieval Reenactment in the SCA. He loves to do archery, armored combat, brewing, and woodworking.

Elizabeth Barron

She loves to work in tech. She writes sci-fi novels , loves to take photos and runs an Etsy shop. She was a PHP Community Manager at Engine Yard from Oct 2011 – Nov 2012. And now works as a Patchwork Community Manager at GitHub from Dec 2012 – Present.

Michelangelo van Dam

A professional PHP consultant and Zend Framework expert who also works for the government and larger expertises. He is the president of PHPBenelux, which is a PHP group running in Belgium Netherlands and Luxembourg. He is a speaker and speaks on several PHP conferences all around the world.  He is the CEO of In2IT from Jan 2011 – Present, Co-Founder of PHP Europe,  Member of the board at PHPBenelux, Coach at CoderDojo Belgium and Secretary at Dutch Web Alliance.

Rafael Dohms

Rafael Dohms, a Web developer and an experienced in PHP development. He is a PHP Evangelist and an author at doh.ms, public speaker, and contributor. He founded 3 active User Groups during his experience and  an active member of the community.

In his spare time, he helps to manage the Amsterdam PHP User Group, amongst other projects. He is also the Lead Backend Engineer at Usabilla from Jul 2016 – Present.

Matthew Weier O’Phinney

Matthew is the  Project Lead of Zend Framework at Zend Technologies from Apr 2009 – Present. He is a Zend Certified Engineer and is an active member of the Zend Education Advisory Board. The activities of this group is to authorize the Zend Certification Exam. He loves to write blogs on PHP-related topics and presents tutorials on PHP development.

Elizabeth Marie Smith

She is an open source advocate and loves to work as a volunteer in many open source projects. She is a public speaker and spoken at many conferences. The mother of four is a mentor for new programmers . She works as a Contributor for PHP from  Oct 2006 – present.

Cal Evans

Cal has worked with PHP and MySQL on Linux OS and windows for past 10 years. Cal is married to Kathy and is the father of two. He enjoys and loves to build and manage development teams, using highly imitated management style which he calls “Management by Wandering Around”.

Cal loves to blog at calevans.com and also he is the founder and host of Nomad PHP. He has more than 20 years of working experience. He is also the CEO of E.I.C.C inc , founded Jan 1997.

Chris Cornutt

Chris Cornutt is an active member of PHP community who loves to speak and attend conferences all around the US. He is the author of two sites PHP Developer.org and Joind.in. He organized Dallas-based Lone Star PHP Conference.

He have more than 17 years experience and is currently the Webmaster for PHP Developer.org since Aug 1999 – Present, Senior Editor at Websec.io since Aug 2012 – Present and Application Security Engineer at Pardot since Feb 2015 – Present.

Keith Casey

He is currently working on the platform team at Okta. He loves to play with APIs, their identities, and authentications. His first goal is to give good technology in hands of good people so that they can do good things.

In spare time, he helps to build the Austin tech community. He writes blogs at caseysoftware.com and is fond of monkeys. Also, he is the co-author of book “A Practical Approach to API Design” from Leanpub.

Davey Shafik

Davey has 12 years of experience in Web Development. He is the  Author of php[architect]’s Zend PHP 5 Certification Guide Sitepoint’s PHP Anthology: 101 Tips, Tricks, and Hacks. Also, he wrote Cutting Edge Code, as well as numerous magazine articles.

He is a public speaker and attends many conferences around the world. Davey is the Founding Contributor of Zend Framework, and he is the long-time PEAR contributor. A core feature of PHP 5.3 named PHAR was originally written by Davey Shafik.

Chris Hartjes

Chris is a PHP champion and is developing web applications of every sizes and shapes since 1998. He has more than 20 years experience and right now he currently work as a Senior QA Engineer for Mozilla and a night job to build his own info-product empire through grumpy-learning.com. He is the co-organizer of the True North PHP conference.

Lorna Mitchell

Lorna  is the Developer Advocate for IBM Cloud Data Services .She works with the open source database technologies.
Lorna is the author of “PHP Web Services” and “PHP Master” also she is a speaker and writer of a number of outlets.

Conclusion:

These are some PHP most influential personalities whom you must follow in 2017 so that you can keep yourself up to date about the latest updates on PHP community.  Following them will help you to polish your skills in PHP.

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