What is necessary to be a PHP developer?

I know that freeCodeCamp is focused on M.E.R.N Stack, but i really like this forum and i think that here i can get the awnser to this question.

Beyond the php, laravel and Wordpress, what is necessary to be a PHP developer?

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Masochism?

Just kidding. In 20 years, when everyone is super proficient in ~25986 different JavaScript frameworks and libraries, that one remaining PHP developer will be quite well-paid.

Still kidding, don’t mind me. Back to your question. Have you some experience yet? Because if you’re a beginner, you’ll have enough to do for the next months just learning the basics of PHP (and Laravel). It’s quite common to combine SQL databases with PHP, so that would definitely be something I’d also learn.

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Depends on what you want to build.

Plenty of PHP developers are just Wordpress developers. To be a Wordpress dev all you really need to know is some PHP fundamentals, how to use and customize themes, strong fundamentals of HTML/CSS, and understand how to work with and manage a database. Beyond that you’ll want to know how to setup a development environment and actually deploy a site but that’s pretty much it.

If you want to build web apps then Laravel is going to be a better place to focus your time.

For that path you’ll want more than just fundamental PHP. You’ll really want to pick up at least a basic understanding of Object Oriented Programming and OOP design principles. You’ll also want to make sure you understand MVC architecture and how to work in an MVC app.

It’ll also be helpful to understand how PHP applications work because they run very differently when compared to a Wordpress or your typical 5 page website.

You’ll need to understand what routing is, how to handle query parameters and request validation as well as understand the request lifecycle.

The path of least resistance with a Laravel app is to use a relational database like MySql or Postgres so you’ll want to learn the database side of things as well. Eloquent is a tool for querying and writing to a relational database and is provided by Laravel so the best way to start is just learning how to work with Eloquent.

The last piece would be to either have basic proficiency with at least one frontend framework (preferably Vue) or just focus on Blade (the templating language for PHP that ships with Laravel).

So at a high-level you’ll want to know how to set up CRUD for a resource across the whole stack which means adding a database migration for the table, setting up the model, controller and the view/views which would be a page where the resource is listed, a button that can delete, and a form(s) to create/update the resource.

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