PHPfriendly

PHPfriendly is a community-driven initiative that collects guidelines, examples, and tooling designed to help PHP projects be friendly to developers, servers, and the wider PHP ecosystem. It emphasizes clarity, maintainability, and interoperability across PHP versions and hosting environments, aiming to reduce deployment friction and upgrade risk.

Core principles include readable code, consistent naming, explicit dependency management, secure coding practices, backward compatibility, and testability. The guidelines encourage using established PHP patterns, avoiding version-specific quirks, and aligning with widely adopted standards where possible.

Resources typically offered include coding standards, sample project templates, linting rules, testing templates, and a compatibility matrix showing supported PHP versions. Many PHPfriendly resources advocate using modern PHP features, while maintaining portability to older PHP runtimes.

Adoption and governance: The initiative is community-led, without a formal central authority. Contributions come from individual developers, projects, and organizations; maintainers curate content and coordinate updates with related standards efforts such as PSR and PHP-FIG.

See also: PHP, PSR standards, PHP-FIG.