Matt Stauffer Joins the PHP Foundation Board — What It Means for Laravel
Published on by Eric L. Barnes
Matt Stauffer has a lot on his plate. He runs Tighten, he's an open source contributor, and he wrote Laravel Up and Running. Now he can add one more thing to that list: board member of the PHP Foundation.
He joined me to talk about what the foundation actually does, what this means for Laravel, and why he thinks this is a turning point for PHP's reputation.
How It Happened
It started with a job listing. The PHP Foundation was looking for a new executive director, and a friend forwarded it to Matt half-jokingly — the role is full-time, and Matt already has a full-time job. He laughed it off at first, but the idea kept nagging at him.
He ended up applying anyway, being upfront that he couldn't take it on full-time. It didn't work out for the role itself, but through the process the foundation heard his vision for the community and asked if he'd be willing to join the board instead. He said yes.
The new executive director, Elizabeth Barron, started at the end of February. Matt joined the board at the end of March. It's early days.
What the PHP Foundation Actually Does
If you've heard of the PHP Foundation but weren't totally sure what it does, you're not alone. The short version: it's a group of companies and community members who wanted PHP to have long-term organizational support beyond just the PHP internals mailing list.
Internals is great, it's where the actual language development happens, but it's mostly developers working on low-level language features, many of them doing it in their spare time out of love for the language. That leaves a gap when it comes to things like marketing, fundraising, community building, and reputation management.
The foundation exists to fill that gap. It raises money from platinum sponsors — companies that rely on PHP and want to see it thrive — and uses those funds to financially support PHP contributors. Right now there are eleven contractors working on the core language or things closely connected to it. The foundation also provides organizational structure and community guidance that internals was never really set up to handle.
One thing worth clarifying: the foundation doesn't direct what internals works on. It provides financial support and a broader organizational layer, but the PHP internals team still runs its own voting processes and sets its own agenda. So if you were hoping Matt could get primitives added to the language, sorry.
What It Means for Laravel
This is the question Laravel developers will naturally ask, and the honest answer right now is: it's too early to know the specifics. But the bigger picture is clear.
Matt and Taylor Otwell have spent years trying to build bridges between the Laravel world and the broader PHP community, with limited success. For whatever historical reason, "PHP" as an identity and "Laravel" as an identity have felt disconnected — despite the obvious fact that Laravel is PHP.
Matt sees his board seat as an opening to change that. Not by pushing Laravel-specific features into the language, but by working on the thing Laravel developers actually complain about most: PHP's reputation.
He described being on business development calls where everything is going well, a client wants to use Laravel, and then someone on their side says "it's PHP" and the deal falls apart. That's the problem he wants to work on. The PHP Foundation is uniquely positioned to tackle marketing, documentation, outreach to universities and boot camps, and the general perception of PHP in places like Silicon Valley where it's still dismissed as old and outdated.
If that changes, and Matt thinks it can, we benefit directly.
How You Can Help
The foundation can use support in a few forms.
The most direct is financial. If your company is built on PHP, Matt's pitch is simple: the language that makes your business possible deserves some of that money back. The foundation is working on making it clearer exactly what donations fund and what impact they have, but the work is happening now. You can find sponsorship info at thephp.foundation.
If money isn't an option, there are other ways in. Matt mentioned he'll be looking for people who can contribute design work, social media help, marketing expertise, or connections — universities, boot camps, companies considering PHP for new projects. The personal network is something the foundation hasn't fully tapped yet, and he's interested in changing that.
And if you just want to stay informed, follow the foundation on its social channels or follow Matt directly. He plans to be vocal about what the board is working on.
The main thing he asked for, beyond anything else, is patience. The foundation is early in a new chapter — new executive director, new board members, new energy — and the communication and clarity around its work is going to improve. Don't tune out just because the picture isn't fully formed yet.
The Bigger Picture
There's something worth sitting with here. PHP powers a huge portion of the internet. Laravel has done remarkable work building a modern, developer-friendly ecosystem on top of it. But PHP's reputation in certain circles remains stuck in 2005, and that costs real projects and real clients.
The PHP Foundation, with someone like Matt on the board who has lived the frustration of losing deals over a language stigma is one of the more credible efforts to actually fix that. Not by changing what PHP is, but by changing how it's perceived and supported.
Full Transcript
Eric Barnes: Hey everyone, welcome to the show. With me today is a special guest. He's a member of the Laravel Community Forever, open source creator, owner of Titan, the awesome agency within the Laravel community and the author of Laravel Up and Running. You gotta have your props when you do your introductions. So Matt, welcome to the show here.
Matt Stauffer: I love that. Fantastic. Thanks so much, my friend. So good to be here.
Eric Barnes: So I have you on because you've got some big news. So in the last few weeks, you've actually joined the board of the PHP Foundation. So how did that come about?
Matt Stauffer: Yeah, so recently the PHP Foundation said, we're looking for a new executive director. Dave Hicking, my friend, sent it to me and said, if only you had time, because it's a full-time job. And I laughed because I was like, yeah, I mean, I got a full-time job running an agency. And after like, I think a week or something like that, I was just like, man, that really would be the dream. Because I've wanted so long to be a part of helping PHP's reputation and marketing kind of like modernize. And I was like, could I possibly actually do it, you know, bring everybody together. So I went through the application process.
Just saying, I have a full-time job. I couldn't do this full-time. We'd have to work that out. And then it was sort of like, nah, not really. It's not gonna work, for various reasons why, you know, they said it's not gonna be a good fit. I was totally on board. But through that process, they kind of heard my vision for the community and what I'm excited about, what I've tried to do and not been able to do in the past. And they're like, no, that's something we might wanna have around as a voice. Would you be willing to be on the board? And I was like, I'm honored to be on the board.
They brought me onto the board and then they also brought on the new executive director Elizabeth Barron. So she started at the end of February and then I joined at the end of March.
Eric Barnes: Awesome, awesome. Yeah, the end of March — that was, yeah, I guess that's been a week? Yeah, okay. I knew it was super relevant. Like it just happened. So can you kind of give me, I know you're brand new, but sort of the insights into what this PHP Foundation actually does and their purpose in the grand scheme of PHP.
Matt Stauffer: Yeah, 100%. I mean, if you go to php.foundation, you're going to get a really good kind of like a true big pitch at the top that says we support, advance and develop the PHP language. And the mission goes into the further kind of direction there. But it's basically a whole bunch of people who are all relying on the PHP language, whether because they were a company that uses PHP, they were a framework that is built on PHP, maybe they're a hosting company that deals with PHP or whatever. They all said we want PHP to have longevity. We want to do the work that it takes to make sure it not only continues, but it continues and thrives.
So they said we're going to provide financial support. These are based on a lot of these companies being what they're called platinum sponsors to kind of give financial support to the foundation to help it advance. But then also guidance. So they've got people, you know, like the founder of PHP and other folks like actively contributing towards helping make sure it moves forward together — because the PHP organization is really just PHP internals. The only organization there is around PHP is internals, and internals is really just a bunch of developers who want to work on really low-level PHP stuff. And that's great and wonderful, and we all need them there, and we're grateful for them doing what they're doing, but there's a difference between being a developer and being a marketer, being a developer and being a fundraiser, being a developer and thinking about community, right? I'm not saying developers can't do those things, but right now PHP itself really just has internals. And so the idea behind the foundation was let's build kind of support and structure outside of just some developers, many of whom were doing this work in their free time because it was love of the game kind of thing — let's get finances behind it, let's get organization, let's get kind of guidance structure around it. So the foundation tries to do all those things in conversation and relationship with PHP internals.
Eric Barnes: Gotcha. So they don't have like super — I guess sort of the internals is still sort of like a separate entity in that like you're not guiding what internals are doing through the board so much as giving them support. Is that sort of the right way of thinking about it?
Matt Stauffer: Yeah, that is the right way to think about it. I wouldn't say there's no guidance whatsoever, in part because the PHP Foundation has a bunch of contractors. Basically, they're providing financial support to a bunch of developers, many of whom are a part of PHP internals. But at least as of right now, PHP Foundation doesn't say, you need to work on this, you need to work on that. PHP Foundation just says, we're grateful for what you're doing for the community. Here's some money so you can keep doing it. So as of right now, there's no structure. I don't know if that's how it's gonna be forever. I don't know of any plans to change that, but I can say for right now that is definitively what's going on.
It's funny, because when I joined, a lot of people said, get me primitives, everything like that. And I'm like, y'all, I'm sorry, but maybe I have like a 5% stronger voice than I did before to go bother somebody, but in the end, it's still internals as internals. They have their own voting processes. They have their own way of doing things. Foundation's not in charge of them at all.
Eric Barnes: Gotcha. And now as far as the board goes, do you know how long you're going to stay on the board or how often they get rotated around?
Matt Stauffer: Yeah, so it's a three-year term in general. You could quit early, you could be fired early, but in general it's a three-year term. I don't know exactly what the executive director's term is gonna be, but I imagine it's probably three years as well. There's a whole structured document about how the foundation is organized, how the board is organized. There must be between five and ten people, and some of them must be from the platinum sponsors, and some from the community. It's all this kind of complicated thing.
But a lot of it has to do basically with honoring the three-year term, people being nominated by another board member, being voted in, and having the correct number of people from the community and from the platinum sponsors and from the non-platinum sponsors to build an actual kind of good structured board within the shape of five to ten people.
Eric Barnes: Awesome. And I'm assuming just like any board, you have to meet X number of times per year and y'all sort of, yeah, keep minutes, the whole nine yards. You get to vote, you say, I second.
Matt Stauffer: Yeah, monthly. And Elizabeth, not me, thankfully, Elizabeth is handling all of that. But yes, we've got a monthly meeting. Elizabeth is taking all the notes and everything like that. And she's the one who's going to communicate our decisions and the things we're thinking about out to the public. And the prior executive director was not a paid position. It was Roman doing a little bit of work basically on top of his JetBrains job. And I think JetBrains may have given him a few hours a week to work on it, but he really did not have the ability to do the things he'd wanna do. Like Roman full-time would've killed, but Roman had a full-time job. So one of the things I guess that the board made the decision to do is say in order to be like the fullness of who we wanna be, we gotta put our money where our mouth is — we need an executive director who can actually make this their main job. And so I imagine we're gonna see even more communication, even more structure just because of Elizabeth being in a different position than Roman was in. But of course I also hope that as a board member I get to help us do a good job of all these things too.
Eric Barnes: Yeah, that's awesome. And that sort of was my second question — let's say she's the leader for two or three years. After that, do you get to remain on the board? You're just not in the director position? Or do you have to be out for so long and then get to come back in from the bottom back up?
Matt Stauffer: It's not 100% clear whether the executive director is or isn't on the board. I think that's actually part of the conversation they're trying to have right now. My guess is that Roman was both the ED and then also was on the board. Roman is definitely on the board right now. So I don't know exactly how that all pans out, but if I had to guess, I would guess that they end up saying the executive director is not a part of the board and has a limited term, maybe three years or something like that. And if someone were to go from three years as the ED to three years on the board, that would be perfectly acceptable. But that's a pure guess. We haven't had any conversations about it. I'm not privy to anything private. That's just a guess from my side.
Eric Barnes: Gotcha, yeah. And to sort of prefix or postfix — again, Matt's only been on the board for a week. So like we're going in fresh on this. One meeting. So my next question since I'm in Laravel, you're in Laravel — what is this gonna mean for Laravel as a whole? Or do we even know at this point yet?
Matt Stauffer: We don't know, but one thing I can say for sure is that historically, Taylor and I — others, but definitely Taylor and I — have spent a lot of time and energy trying to build bridges between the PHP world and the Laravel world. We worked really hard on it, close to 10 years ago, and didn't see a lot of success. And I think that this is the beginning of a new round of that. I think this is the beginning of a new moment for there to be bridges, not just between Laravel and PHP. I mean, Laravel's written in PHP. We are PHP, right? But for some reason, there has just been this idea that PHP means a certain set of people who went to conferences together, who are using a certain set of old school approved frameworks, and Laravel was never a part of that for some strange reason. It's all BS, and I don't think that the people I'm talking to or interacting with day to day have any desire to see that be the case.
So my hope is that this is the beginning of a new era of Laravel feeling connected to the rest of the PHP world and the rest of the PHP world feeling like Laravel's connected there, sharing resources, sharing knowledge. PHP is not old school people who refuse to use a framework — and WordPress is PHP and Laravel is PHP and all these other people are PHP. So I hope that we're going to get to a place where we're stepping out of silos a little bit.
In the past when someone said stepping out of silos, it was just this really imbalanced thing that people used to kind of be like, well, Laravel shouldn't just — no, no. My hope is that it's just we're all friends. We all help each other. We all are contributing. So in terms of what this means for Laravel, I do think it is a little olive-branchy from the existing PHP world. And we're gonna take that olive branch and we're gonna extend one ourselves — a positive thing. It doesn't mean that all of a sudden I can just say everything the Laravel world wants is now gonna be in the language, right? But it does mean that I can say, hey guys, like — one of the things I said in my first call was, I'm in business development calls, people wanna use Laravel and they hear that PHP is old and outdated. I will do the work it takes to work within the PHP Foundation. Because one of the things the PHP Foundation has the ability to do is marketing and positioning.
I'm like, that's one of the things I wanna work on. As a board member, I wanna work on whatever I can do to help make PHP's marketing and reputation move forward in the way that things like Laravel's marketing reputation have moved forward. I think we're all gonna benefit from that, right? I am in these sales calls being told we are almost the whole way through and then somebody on the board said, it's PHP, you can't work with us, and we lose the project. And that means Laravel loses that client, right? We lose that potential whole contribution to our world. I'm hoping that the board will give me the opportunity to fix some of that.
Eric Barnes: Yeah, that would be really nice. And two, it's like — to me, it's always been weird because like there's this divide, but it's just different communities sort of see the world differently. But we're still all the same in the end. We're just developers and we like to build stuff. So that was always weird to me. And you know, coming from the CodeIgniter/Laravel side — how people didn't like either one of those frameworks. It's like, well, you know, it is what it is.
But so I'm really excited for that part of it. I think that would be huge. And like you mentioned WordPress, you know, there's so many WordPress, Drupal, phpBB — if it's still around — that sort of just kind of are out there and they exist in their own silos, like you said. So I guess leading from there and the foundation side — if people want to contribute, what, how can people help at this moment? Is it more of just helping PHP, going to the internal side and building up and then the foundation takes notice and is like, hey, we want you to be on this board now? Or do you have any ideas there?
Matt Stauffer: Yeah, one of the things we talked about on the first call that I actually was on was what does it look like to make it easier for people to contribute? Because one of the things Elizabeth did when she first stepped into this position is interviewed like 60 people back to back and said, what are the issues? And one of the things she heard a lot was we would love PHP to be easier for people to contribute towards. And so we started talking about, well, what should be easier? Are we talking about PHP internals? Are we talking about the PHP website?
And I think that a lot of our conversations in these first six to twelve months are gonna be around what does it look like to bring more people in — to knowing what's going on, to knowing what their contribution can look like and all of that. Also, I think one of the things I'll say is: do consider donating to the PHP Foundation, especially getting your company to donate. But one of the things we wanna do as the PHP Foundation is make it really clear what that actually does. Because PHP Foundation is doing things, but what are the things that they're doing and what would your money make happen?
That's not happening without your money — that's not super clear right now. So I would say it's probably worth finding some way to either get in touch with one of the members of the board, follow one of us on your favorite social media platform, or the PHP Foundation itself. If you go to php.foundation, down in the footer, you can see the foundation's on Twitter and all the other platforms. So check that out because the hope is that that is gonna be the space where things are communicated — hey, here is what we're going to do. Now you can see where the money would go. Can you bring your company in to sponsor us because it will go towards this? But also things like, hey, have you always wanted to contribute to internals, but it was really unclear how to do so? Now we're making it easy. Here's a video. Here's a guide. Here's whatever.
So I would say the answer of what to do right now is: I think the main thing the PHP Foundation could use help with is A, patience, and B, money. But while I would say that somebody giving money to the foundation is great, if you're interested in it, go check out the PHP Foundation. It'll tell you what the money is being spent towards. I think that's all going to be communicated better in the future. And what more money goes towards will also be better communicated in the future. So I would say if you're like, look, I've got a company, we're using PHP, I'm hearing about this and I'm like, yeah, I really want to see other things happen — then please come have your company support the PHP Foundation. Make it happen, right? Like that is absolutely valuable. Don't let me stop you.
But if you're hearing this and you're like, man, you're asking for money and I don't even know what it does — that's fine. That's a very reasonable point. And don't just do nothing because of that, right? Go follow the foundation. Follow me if you want. I'll be talking about stuff we're working on. Go check it out or maybe even give in the $10 a month range. Again, I'm not saying individuals have to give a ton of money. I don't think the answer to the PHP foundation is a bunch of people giving $5 a month. Not that anyone shouldn't, but to me, it is all of the companies that are making all the money that we make because we have PHP — those are the folks I'm like, consider kicking back a little bit, you know?
So I would say consider supporting. If you're making money off of PHP, consider supporting and give a little patience, but stay connected. Because if you were patient and then you never see what we do, well then, I don't know. But if you're patient and paying attention, there's more cool stuff coming.
Eric Barnes: Awesome, awesome. Well, I was gonna say one thing that I think you mentioned is like the foundation actually sponsors or pays contributors to actually make PHP better. And to me, like that's one of the benefits of a thing like this — now instead of just being like, well, this is my spare time, you actually can pay people to do some work, which is awesome. Especially considering how big PHP is, you know. It's used everywhere.
Matt Stauffer: Yeah, right now, if you go to php.foundation/structure, you can see eleven people who are contractors from the foundation. Some of them full time, some of them part time, and they're all working on either the language or things that are kind of core connected to the language. I think all of these folks are actually working on the core. But if not, they're all definitely working on things that are very close to the core.
Literally one way to help PHP as a language continue is to give money to the PHP Foundation so that they can support these people financially who are helping PHP continue. But again, it will be clear in the future — but don't let that stop you.
Eric Barnes: Right. Well, and if I heard correctly what you said earlier, if your company gives enough, you can actually get a board seat. So there you go. There's your in right there. You get your company to be a diamond or whatever partner and you'll have a little voice in there. But Matt, that was sort of all the questions I had written down. I'll sort of open the floor to you and let you close this out — go through anything that I may have missed that you'd like the Laravel community to know about.
Matt Stauffer: That's true, that is a way to have an impact. Yeah, I think it's platinum. Yeah, that's a good point.
I mean, I think I would say the main thing is that the PHP Foundation is primarily equipped to do things other than the actual specific code of PHP. And I still think there's a future where the foundation has a little bit more guidance towards the code that's happening, but that's not in my hands. What I can say it definitely has the ability to do is help the community, help the interrelations, help the ecosystem, help the marketing, help the reputation of PHP. Nobody's better equipped to do that than the PHP Foundation.
And the thing is that I know that there are some language-level features that Laravel people have always wanted — like, let's have multi-line short closures. Great. But in general, if you hear a person in Laravel ask for something from PHP, it's almost always reputational. It's almost always, you know, let's make the marketing better. Let's make the docs clear. Let's get less negative opinion about it in Silicon Valley. Let's get boot camps to actually use PHP, right? That is what the PHP Foundation is uniquely and especially equipped to do. So if you want to see those happen — and those are the things I want to see happen — then you want to support the PHP Foundation. If you are in business and you're struggling with the negative reputation people have about PHP, you want to support the PHP Foundation. If you're tired of this whole thing where PHP feels like the not-cool kid or whatever — you want the PHP Foundation, right?
So A, certainly consider giving financially. But B, I will be asking people to help donate design. You know, if someone's like, look, I don't have money to give, but I got design skills — I don't got money to give, but I understand social media, I understand marketing, I have connections or whatever — we're going to try to do that. If you're like, look, I work at a university and I use Laravel, I'm going to probably be wanting to talk to you to figure out what does it look like. I work at a boot camp and I'm interested in Laravel — all these things. The personal connections are the things that I think we have a lot of opportunity to take advantage of in turning this thing over, where we're no longer freaking talking about PHP being the reason, PHP's negative reputation being the reason anything happens. I'm tired of it. It's time to be done with it. And I think that the foundation is equipped to solve that better than anybody else.
Eric Barnes: I love that, I love that. I'm very excited for the future, because I feel like this has been needed for years and having somebody I know on the board is kind of cool. So I know I'm not going to get any special treatment, but just knowing somebody — hey, somebody's on the board, somebody's looking out for, not saying my best interest, but Laravel — you have us in the back of your mind.
Matt Stauffer: Cut off your best interest, Eric Barnes, are you kidding? I hear you.
Eric Barnes: But Matt, I want to thank you so much for coming on, spending a few minutes just talking about this new foundation and your board seat and all that, because I think it's really cool and it's really interesting for our community.
