Do you (or your company) want to be running a project and getting patches and contributions back? Who is the target audience?
In the last year or so I've open-sourced a project I did for a state agency (done in Java) - every single request I get from people about the code is "is it in php? can i install it like wordpress or moodle?"
PHP is going to give you a huge pool of potential users and contributors simply because of its reach. Whether that's who you're aiming at or not is a different question.
The purpose is simply to give back and hopefully have wider user than ourselves to build a better tool besides our explicit use-case.
Since we're using AngularJS+D3+Symfony specifically, I figured others could at least learn the same way I did by seeing a real application using these technologies rather than the usual example apps.
The target audience consists of users like me, which need a simple live dashboard to see high-level metrics and tell (1) if anything may be wrong and (2) if performance is improved for a custom application using MySQL, Postgres or MongoDB.
It's not meant to be a BI solution like QlikView (which the company uses internally and is awful), but something light, embeddable, and doesn't require `for..each`ing custom SQL queries and mapping it to D3 just to make sure the last deployment didn't break anything.
I'm very surprised that users wanted something in PHP or as installable as Wordpress. The installable part is pretty simple, and most configuration is done on the client-side. I just wasn't sure if a Node backend would be more accessible to this audience.
I'm not at all surprised. Average every day people are asking for this, not professional coders. The uptake of projects has a lot to do with installability - if they can't install it, they can never use it or tell others to use it.
"The target audience consists of users like me" and "we're using AngularJS+D3+Symfony specifically" = you're not really an average developer - certainly not an average PHP developer, and certainly not an end user who might want a dashboard.
Personally, I'd say keep it with PHP for now. If it gets users and grows, so be it. If not, and you have time to branch out in to other tech based on real business needs, branch out at that point.
I agree with keeping it PHP for now. Take a Lean Startup approach and think of this as your MVP. When you have actual users they will help you decide what other languages/technologies you can use to improve performance etc. but don't optimize prematurely. PHP will be just fine.
Do you (or your company) want to be running a project and getting patches and contributions back? Who is the target audience?
In the last year or so I've open-sourced a project I did for a state agency (done in Java) - every single request I get from people about the code is "is it in php? can i install it like wordpress or moodle?"
PHP is going to give you a huge pool of potential users and contributors simply because of its reach. Whether that's who you're aiming at or not is a different question.