20 Great PHP Libraries You Need to Know

You’re in the middle of a project, and need to get everything done as soon as possible. To keep the deadline and still have a life, you would better to collect this awesome library on your fingertip. By knowing this library capability, then you’ll know when to use any of them.

Charting Library

You can create simple graph or chart using GD library on PHP, but to help you create more complex chart, then you’ll need this awesome library.

pChart – a PHP class to build charts.
Libchart – Simple PHP chart drawing library.
JpGraph – Object-oriented graph creating library for PHP.
Open Flash Chart – Flash based charting library.

RSS Parser Library

Parsing a RSS is not a fun thing to do, so you would better put this library and get everything done.

MagpieRSS – RSS for PHP.
SimplePie – Super-fast, easy-to-use, RSS and Atom feed parsing in PHP.

Thumbnail Generator

Just another way to create thumbnail.

phpThumb – The PHP thumbnail creator.

Payment

Dealing with an e-commerce site? Need payment solution? Don’t worry. Let this library help you.

PHP Payment Library – PHP Payment Library for Paypal, Authorize.net and 2Checkout (2CO)

OpenID

Just in case you need to implement OpenID to your project.

PHP-OpenID – OpenID implementation in PHP.

Database Abstraction/ORM

Writing SQL Query isn’t really exciting. These library let you smile more.

ADOdb – Database abstraction library for PHP.
Doctrine – Object relational mapper (ORM) for PHP 5.2.3+ that sits on top of a powerful database abstraction layer (DBAL).
Propel – Object-Relational Mapping framework for PHP5
Outlet – an Open source object-to-relational mapping tool for PHP.

PDF Generator

FPDF – PHP class which allows to generate PDF files with pure PHP.

Excel

Need to generate your report in Excel file. Well, you better have this library on your side.

php-excel – Very simple library for generating excel documents from php on-the-fly.
PHP Excel Reader – Parse and retrieve information from XLS files.

E-Mail

Don’t like PHP mail function? Put this library on your project, and you have more features when dealing with email.

Swift Mailer – Free Feature-rich PHP Mailer.
PHPMailer - Powerful email transport class with a big features and small footprint.

Unit Testing

For Test-driven development lover, these library will help you get your heart at home.

SimpleTest – PHP unit test and web test framework.
PHPUnit – Member of the xUnit family of testing frameworks and provides both a framework that makes the writing of tests easy as well as the functionality to easily run the tests and analyse their results.