cxgslegend
commented
4 years ago I am not a maintainer, so I may be wrong. But from what I understand, coc-phpls is using the intelephense npm package. For me, its installed in ~/.config/coc/extensions/node_modules/coc-phpls/node_modules/intelephense. So answer to your question about what the difference is between intelephsense and coc-phpls would be there is no difference.
The way I think about it is coc-phpls takes the intelephense language server and ties it into the coc extension system. So its kind of like an integration layer. This is why you can read the intelephense-docs if you want to know how to configure coc-phpls. Because at the end of the day, you are still using the intelephense lsp. Sure its integrated into coc through coc-phpls, but its still intelephense.
ovidius72
Can you please explain me what is the difference (or benefits) on using this extension instead of using intelephense globally installed via npm. In the coc.nvim wiki page( language servers sections), I see that for PHP the options are this extension or to use the bmewburn/intelephense-docs (or even php-language-server) but I couldn't understand which one is better and why since both are using intelephense. Thanks