Personal Home Page. Though very few associate PHP with its acronym, PHP started as an embedded scripting language for dynamic web applications. Today, however, PHP is a far more powerful server-side object-oriented language that powers most of the internet. It is designed for programming the connections and functionality between the exterior of a website (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) and its data. Newer technologies have been coming out to replace PHP, but you can not deny its overwhelming popularity in websites around the world. In fact, the three largest Content Management Systems are all built on PHP, including WordPress.