Version
To check which version of PHP is being used, you can use the
phpinfo()
function.
This will display a lot of information about the current version of PHP, including its version number.
You can also check the version number by running the command
php -v
in your terminal.
About PHP
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language especially suited to web development.
PHP is a scripting language that is purposed to the creation of web applications and the creation of general web
pages.
PHP runs on the server-side and is usually embedded into HTML with a specific delimitation to point out which
segments are PHP code.
Importantly, PHP code is not visible to the user like HTML might be, which makes it secure to implement whatever you
would like on the page.
PHP is mainly used for websites and web applications. Why is it so popular? Besides the advantages that we
mentioned in the paragraph above,
it is important to note that it is open-source code,
allowing people to change functionalities and to commercialize the code without any barriers or restrictions.
PHP is actively maintained, although a lot of websites utilize old versions of PHP,
but it still nice to have an active community of developers that consistently solve the inevitable problems that
come
with a technology like this.
PHP runs on the server-end. This makes it very suitable for applications where a big amount of data is to be
accessed and connected to the user interface.
Things like e-Commerce or even Facebook have PHP applications that make the data connections secure,
but also accessible to the user, no matter how large the databases might be. PHP is also commonly connected with
MySQL,
which also boosts its capacities to interact with and show data to the final user.
Releases
PHP is currently on the 8.0.5 version released in April 2021.
The 8.0.4 version was released in May of the same year, showing how dedicated the community is to add new
features and fix the bugs that come up.