GoKawiilGermany is spending €108 million to move its federal websites onto a PHP application.
The money is the budget for the eleventh version of the Government Site Builder, the German federal administration's standard content management solution: €26.88 million for product development and support, €73.2 million for migration and relaunch, €8 million for operations, phased over four years. More than 80 federal agencies and institutions already use it, and they have built well over 250 websites with it.
In 2025, The PHP Foundation received $730,534 in total contributions.
I am not going to argue from those two numbers that PHP deserves better treatment. What I want to describe is something that has gone largely unnoticed, including by those of us who work on PHP: across Europe, public administrations have already decided what their digital infrastructure runs on. They decided it in procurement documents, framework agreements, and coalition agreements. And when those documents say "digital sovereignty", what they describe, over and over, is a PHP application.
Where citizens actually reach their governments
The European Commission is the largest case: At the Drupal4Gov EU conference in Brussels in January 2026, the team behind the Europa Web Publishing Platform described what they operate: 770 live sites for 44 different Commission services, 700 million visits and 2.2 billion page views per year. The move to a shared Drupal platform began in 2019, because letting each Directorate-General maintain its own customised codebase had made security patching and consistent user experience progressively harder. The reusable parts are public, in the OpenEuropa and ec-europa organisations on GitHub.
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency runs its Sustainability Portal on Drupal: a regulatory compliance platform serving over 350 airlines and 31 national authorities for the ReFuelEU Aviation regulation. Analytics run on Matomo, email on Mautic. Three PHP applications carry an aviation compliance regime.
In the Netherlands, DICTU's GovNL CMS brings government website deployment down from three months to ten minutes using design tokens, Drupal Recipes, and automated infrastructure. In France, the Drupal base theme for the state design system is monitored by the Service d'Information du Gouvernement and DINUM, so the French state supervises PHP code as part of its own design authority. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, LocalGov Drupal has over 58 councils sharing a common codebase and pooling development budgets, with reported savings of 50 to 80 percent against building a council website from scratch. In Australia, GovCMS hosts more than 370 websites for 115 government agencies, has been running for over a decade, and holds an OFFICIAL:Sensitive security classification.
Not one of these is a pilot project. Each of them carries the everyday traffic between a government and the people it serves.
Germany's shortlist only had PHP entries
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