Build Social Networks with PHP
Whether you want to create social PHP feeds like Twitter, Instagram, Spotify or Facebook we have you covered! The Stream Activity Feed API handles the technology for the feed and you keep full control over the user experience and design.
PHP Aggregated Feeds, Ranked Feeds, feed specific analytics and personalization all help you improve your app's engagement, retention and conversion. Add PHP Personalized Feeds into your social app with our service.
Working with the Stream API in the PHP language
PHP was first created in 1994 and is one of earliest and most popular languages for building dynamic web applications. In fact, thanks to the popularity of Wordpress it's now recognized that 25% of all websites are built with PHP. It's a great choice for building a Stream powered sites that feature timelines, activity and notification feeds.
The language is well known for being easy to learn. PHP 7 from 2014-15 made some major changes to modernise, improve the language and make it easier to work with. There are also virtually endless options for well priced hosting to keep costs down.
Social Networks
When it comes to building social networking features into special purpose apps or entire social media networks, PHP is a fine choice. In fact, several of the most popular social networks are built with PHP. Facebook is by far the most obvious example and their fork of PHP, known as HHVM allowed them to scale to 1 billion users. Flickr and Tumblr are two other great examples of social applications that grew rapidly and scaled to millions of users with PHP. It makes perfect sense to go with a language that's already been proven by the sites that pioneered these features and user experiences.
Framework
With PHP as a starting point, there are many great frameworks built around the PHP language to simplify and speed up development of your Stream powered applications. We have worked with and can recommend the following:
Laravel (see our Laravel guide). There is also Symfony, CodeIgniter, Zend.
Getting started: open source API Client
Our PHP SDK is getstream-php. It requires PHP 8.1 or newer.
Stable Composer packages are published to Packagist. Contributions in the form of issues, feature suggestions and pull requests are most welcome.