The Resurgence of Lamp Stack Development

PHP development gets a bad reputation in the developer community for many reasons. It is often considered legacy web development, and other languages like NodeJS, Ruby on Rails, and Python have made PHP seem like a boring old relic in the programming world. It also did not have any major updates in a long time before PHP7.  It is commonly used with platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and Magento, something many top developers stay away from who prefer to work on custom sites that are not built using a prebuilt software.
Despite the bad reputation PHP has, the majority of websites are built with PHP, whether they are using WordPress, Magento, Drupal, or just some sort of custom implementation; far more than any other programming language. It is also used by even the biggest and most heavily used website in the world, Facebook, in which billions of people spend a lot of time on the site on a daily basis, compared to Google which is mostly just displaying search results that take you off site.
So here are some reasons why I believe PHP will regain some momentum and improve its reputation in the developer community in 2017 and beyond.
PHP7 was released at the end of 2015, and now has over a year as an established upgrade to the older versions. This is important for many reasons. It is the first major release of PHP in over 10 years, and developers are recognizing that the changes are significant and make PHP a much more modern programming language. Secondly, it is now much more mature, and is used by more and more websites moving into 2017 and beyond now that this will be the second full year it has been in use. Lastly, PHP7 is simply much better than the older versions and has a large number of improvements such as speed, and many other feature / syntax improvements.
Laravel is a fast growing PHP framework that is used by more and more websites and web applications.  Laravel is quickly building a very strong community and now has a “Laracasts” and is helping pave forward modern development leveraging PHP.
Symfony is another framework that is also gaining momentum with its newer release of Symfony 2. Symfony has a strong community around it that is gaining momentum similar to Laravel.
Zend is an established company that built the Zend PHP Framework used by many websites around the world. Zend offers many different PHP training programs and is helping build a much stronger PHP community.
Magento 2 is a much more advanced and modern version of Magento and is now leveraging PHP 7 to improve the eCommerce and PHP community more so than ever before.
WordPress / WooCommerce is by the most used CMS platform and is only growing and growing. Built on PHP, WordPress will continue to pave the way for more and more PHP development requirements and a larger community overall.
Drupal is probably the second most used CMS behind WordPress and is used by a large number of PHP based websites. Drupal will clearly help the PHP community as it becomes a larger platform in the enterprise.