The PHP Foundation
The PHP Foundation
In April 2026, during the first weeks of my tenure as Executive Director, I conducted a listening tour with around 60 people from 18 countries spanning every part of the PHP ecosystem (see Integrating Community Feedback into Foundation Strategy: Part 1). Since then, I have continued to listen and connect with those of you in the community who have something to share. The themes that have surfaced are clear, consistent, and actionable. This document outlines how the PHP Foundation will respond in 2026.
In short, the community loves PHP and believes in the Foundation's role, but is asking us to be clearer, more visible, and more coordinated in addressing existing and future challenges. The 2026 strategy answers those concerns through four themes:
Through our 2025 work, and in addition to addressing community feedback, the Foundation set goals for 2026, which are also baked into this strategy.
By the end of 2026, success looks like: a regular communication cadence for increased transparency; six operational Special Interest Groups with active community engagement and clear goals; a more diversified sponsor base and a clear, repeatable story about modern PHP that the community can carry into rooms where decisions get made.
Four themes organize the 2026 plan. Each maps directly to a category of community feedback and 2026 goals. Together, they answer the dominant request from the listening tour: be more visible, more coordinated, and more clearly responsive to what the community has told us.
The PHP that people remember is not the PHP that exists today. Closing that gap is a multi-year effort. 2026 lays the groundwork: a coordinated voice, better assets for advocacy, and new platforms to tell the story of PHP at scale.
Initiatives
The Foundation has limited staff and limited budget, but the community has enormous capacity for making change. In 2026 we will create six structured Special Interest Groups that give community members multiple ways to contribute and focus their energy on the challenges that currently exist for the PHP ecosystem.
Initiatives
The PHP Foundation and Board will regularly articulate what they are doing and why, and they will be consistently accessible and engaged with the PHP community.
Initiatives
This category contains the work the Foundation contributes to but does not own. The PHP codebase and the future of the language belong to the community. The Foundation's role is to support, facilitate, and convene, not to direct. In 2026, we will be explicit about that role and we will invest where the Foundation can meaningfully help.
Initiatives
The PHP Foundation will launch six community special interest groups, with staggered launches from May through September. Each addresses one or more documented gaps from the listening tour, and each includes participation from the community, along with Foundation staff support. These are meant to be collaborative efforts with existing groups and individuals who have already spent time and energy addressing these topics.
| Group | Addresses |
| Ecosystem Security Team | Cross-community security concerns, triage, disclosure, agentic-tooling assisted vulnerability research, maintainer support. |
| PHP Ambassador Program | Advocacy, representation, marketing of PHP |
| PHP Onboarding Initiative | New user experience, learning resources, education |
| Cryptography Special Interest Group | Post-Quantum Cryptography readiness in PHP and related cryptography conversations |
| Community Events Coalition | User groups, conferences, growing the community |
| PHP Accessibility & Inclusion Special Interest Group | Inclusion, accessibility, language translations, helping the ecosystem build healthy community norms, being a resource for maintainers |
Purpose: Improves security of the PHP ecosystem and helps maintainers as AI-assisted vulnerability research becomes more common. Proactively identifies vulnerabilities and triages vulnerability reports. Builds tooling to assess, classify, and address security issues. Assists maintainers in scanning projects and acts as a trusted resource to monitor and support them in critical scenarios. Note: The Team has already launched *. They have connected with 30 organizations and projects so far and performed over a thousand scans and affected changes in hundreds of repos. If you’re interested in a scan, or have questions for the team, get in touch!*
Success in 2026: Documentation for maintainers on available tooling, best practices and report triage; sustainability plan for continuing the work at the end of the grant; 1000+ projects scanned across the PHP ecosystem.
Purpose: Advocacy for PHP outside the PHP ecosystem. Provides resources for people who want to give talks at open-source conferences and other open-source events; shares CfPs and maintains a calendar of conferences outside the PHP world; develops shared talk assets and messaging, including a maintained "State of Modern PHP" deck.
Success in 2026: at least 3 talks delivered by ambassadors at non-PHP open-source venues; a shared CfP calendar in active use; at least 10 participating community members; regular cadence of virtual gatherings of participants established.
Purpose: Improves the experience of new users from first encounter through first deployment. Identifies setup pain points; coordinates education and learning resources; explores a structured mentorship program; documents a clear onboarding path that newcomers can follow; works with the php.net website team to improve documentation and experience.
Success in 2026: a published "getting started with PHP" path replacing the scattered resources currently in existence; a mentorship pilot with at least 5 mentor/mentee pairs; documented setup-time benchmarks against which 2027 progress can be measured; monthly virtual gatherings of participants established.
Purpose: Provides a venue for Post-Quantum Cryptography discussions, and moves The PHP Foundation into a more active role in the PHP ecosystem's response; maps where cryptography exists across both PHP core and the wider ecosystem; tracks upstream developments in OpenSSL and libsodium; also provides a venue for related conversations and initiatives that may arise.
Success in 2026: a published "clear public readiness roadmap" that regulators, enterprise adopters, and the broader community can reference. Regular cadence of meetings is established.
Purpose: Brings together user group leaders and conference organizers. Maintains a shared speaker pool; shares venue, sponsor, and operations resources; restores and maintains the PHP user group directory; helps promote new CfPs and new events; surfaces contribution opportunities for those looking to volunteer.
Success in 2026: the user group directory is current and active; at least one shared resource bundle (speaker pool, sponsor decks, venue tips) is in circulation; monthly virtual gatherings of organizers established.
Purpose: Works to make the language, its documentation, and its learning resources more accessible to a wider range of people across abilities, geographies, languages, and career stages. Supports community leaders and maintainers in building healthy, inclusive communities, including helping draft codes of conduct, and providing peer support for CoC report responses.
This group intentionally launches later, after the Foundation has demonstrated it can successfully implement and facilitate community-based Special Interest Groups. Sequencing should not be read as deprioritization: an interim advisory group will be convened in July-August to prepare the SIG’s goals and ensure that inclusion principles are baked into the charters of the earlier-launching groups.
Success in 2026: SIG is operational with an active roster and well-articulated goals; a shared code-of-conduct template and response plan for projects to use; an accessibility audit of the primary PHP web properties planned for implementation in 2027.
Fundraising is the single most consequential operational priority in 2026. The 2025 reserve drawdown is sustainable for now, but a multi-year drawdown would erode the Foundation's ability to maintain technical headcount. So although this was a measured and deliberate strategy, we are actively working to minimize the drawdown in 2026.
The timeline below includes high-level initiatives, but it should be noted that there will be many other smaller efforts along the way, driven by standard Foundation operations, individual goals of the community groups, and unforeseen developments and opportunities that emerge throughout the year. This is not a comprehensive list of everything the Foundation will do in 2026.
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| July |
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| August |
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| September |
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| October |
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| November |
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| December |
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| Risk | Mitigation |
| Special Interest Groups stall or fail to attract engagement. | Staggered launches give the Foundation operational headroom; ED-supported launch of each will have engagement as top priority. |
| Accessibility & Inclusion SIG launch timing is read as deprioritization. | Named in the framework announcement from day one; interim advisory grouping will convene in July; inclusion principles baked into earlier SIG infrastructure. |
| Communication cadence not sustained. | Quarterly reporting will be tied to Advisory Board cycles; newsletter will be sent on a regular schedule. |
| Reserve drawdown continues if fundraising targets slip. | Sponsor research front-loaded in Q3; Fundraising effort happens in July; Advisory Board engagement improves; cost discipline maintained. |
| Sponsor concentration risk persists. | Active outreach to mid-tier prospects; exploring new lower-cost tiers to widen the base; community fundraising to grow non-sponsor revenue. |
Alongside the strategic initiatives above, the Foundation maintains an annual operating rhythm. These activities are not part of the 2026 strategic story but are essential to the Foundation's stability and to the community's experience of working with us.
It should be noted that these strategies and ideas are based on the initial findings, and it would be wise to gather even more data that will inform future decisions and plans. We have recently launched a State of PHP Survey in partnership with PhpStorm from JetBrains, and will be releasing the results later in the year. We will also be open to coordinating future surveys and means of data collection.
If you're interested in joining or learning more about a Special Interest Group, the best place to start is by letting us know through this general interest form. We'll also be sharing more details about each group through our newsletter and social media accounts as they launch.
We also want to encourage you to complete the survey as it will be helpful for the entire community to have more insight into how PHP is being used. Please go take the State of PHP Survey.
Lastly, as you know, none of this work is possible without the financial generosity of our community. We are incredibly grateful for all our individual and organizational supporters. If you would like to support The PHP Foundation's mission, please see our Open Collectives:
Whether you're an individual developer, a company that runs PHP, a community organizer, or other type of PHP community member, we would love to include you on this journey. PHP thrives when we all take part!