# Social features and why not PHP based?

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/social-features-and-why-not-php-based/12444
**Category:** Development
**Created:** [February 5, 2014, 4:47am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/social-features-and-why-not-php-based/12444 "2014-02-05T04:47:25Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 8

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### Author: ![mcwumbly](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/mcwumbly/32/103861_2.png) [@mcwumbly](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mcwumbly)
#### Post date: [February 5, 2014, 3:51pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/social-features-and-why-not-php-based/12444/8 "2014-02-05T15:51:02Z")

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Worth considering next time creating two separate topics for each of these discussions, as there are really two separate conversations here:

1. Are there any plans to add more social features to discourse?
2. Why isn’t Discourse using PHP/MySQL? (Or why is it using Ruby/PSSQL?)

I’m not sure where to start with the first question because it seems like you may have a lot of specific ideas about what kinds of social features you’d like to see added. I recommend creating a new topic focused on that subject if you want to push it further because its now gotten a bit lost by the second question.

Why isn’t Discourse using PHP/MySQL?

Its a fair question. It certainly does impact how you go about getting your forum up and running, which is perhaps a downside in the short term, and [developing in Ruby on Rails at first can be a challenge](http://blog.discourse.org/2013/04/discourse-as-your-first-rails-app/). But the team is focused on the long term (you’ll see that repeated elsewhere on this forum).

The answer to “[why not PHP](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/php-sucks-but-it-doesnt-matter.html)” may be different from the answer to “[why Ruby](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html)”?

And as @codinghorror wrote on [this blog post](http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/)

> [@](#):
>
> Robin and his business partner built Forumwarz, a remarkably well designed web game about forum culture in Ruby on Rails back in 2006. …Sam is a superstar – that’s why I originally hired him at Stack Exchange. And he has extensive background in traditional forums with his own Community Tracker – which was written in Ruby, too. It’s another sign from above

In addition to the links above, here are some other topics here on meta on that you may want to peruse:

[https://meta.discourse.org/t/technology-stack-choices/1457](https://meta.discourse.org/t/technology-stack-choices/1457)

> [@Why does Discourse need 1 GB of RAM?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/why-does-discourse-need-1-gb-of-ram/12301):
>
> Most forum software don’t need any where as much RAM as this. I was wondering what Discourse uses this RAM for? Is it doing a powerful amount of caching or what?

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