At php[world] in October, Oscar Merida announced the winners of thid year’s Impact Awards. We’re bringing back the annual awards to help recognize valuable contributors to the PHP community. Winners were tallied after two rounds of voting by php[architect] magazine authors.

1. Best Tool or Service

“When your writing code, designing classes, preparing tests, or managing your application what are the tools and services which make the tasks faster, less error-prone or less stressful? If you were stuck on a deserted island writing PHP code … which would you want to have with you?”

Winner

• Composer/Packagist

Nominees

• PHPStorm
• PHPUnit
• Xdebug

2. Best Framework or Application

“Framework and Application let us proverbially stand on the shoulders of giants. By collaborating, we avoid re-inventing the wheel and can focus on addressing the unique aspects of the problems we face. What framework or PHP-based application do you turn to when starting a new project?”

Winner (Tied)

• Laravel
• Symfony

Nominees

• Slim
• WordPress

3. Best Developer Experience

“Beyond PHP, what other services, APIs, cloud or hosting provider, stand above the rest as easy-to-work with for solving the problems you face. They may be part of a framework or platform mentioned earlier by solving a particular problem really elegantly.”

Winner

• GitHub

Nominees

• Amazon Web Services
• Stripe
• Twilio

4. Lifetime Achievement, Individual

“For this category, please nominate any person who’s made a significant contribution to PHP. This could be a contribution to the language (internals) or the PHP project more broadly (documentation, QA, etc). Or it could be someone who has contributed to PHP’s adoption, education, and broader community.”

Winner

• Sara Golemon

Nominees

• Rasmus Lerdorf
• Nikita Popov
• Derick Rethans

5. Lifetime Achievement, Organization

Automattic, the company behind WordPress and many other online tools, was also recognized for its support of the PHP community and the impact it has on PHP’s usage.

Photo Courtesy of Ryan Weaver