Damien Seguy has posted the PHP statistics for this month - the results from February 2008 - here's some of the highlights:

• PHP 5 set record of growth : + 2,5%, up to 32%
• PHP 5.2 is the second most popular version, ahead of 4.3.
• PHP 4.4.8's popularity is falling

You can check out the numbers yourself for the month as well as the evolution stats showing how things are progressing. He's also added a new graph this month showing the adoption rate that PHP5 is having in the online world.

Ivo Jansch points out a recent interview he was asked to do in the Computerworld UK magazine about the recent launch of the Ibuildings company there in the UK.

I was recently interviewed by Computerworld UK regarding our launch in the UK and the current rise of PHP in the corporate world. The result is online here.

He also asks readers how they see PHP adoption going in their companies: "Post a comment to let me know how 'PHP' and 'Business' go together in your region."

In a new post to his blog, Sandro Groganz asks the questions "does PHP 5 hurt PHP?"

The thing that I keep wondering is if we aren't seeing a slowdown in general PHP adoption due to other technologies being able to get a leg up while PHP 5 was in development and the succeeding slow migration from PHP 4 to 5.

Sandro suggests that, because of the release of PHP5, the creation (and modifications) of PHP applications has slowed, causing the imbalance between applications that are PHP 5 ready.

Jacob Santos makes some of his own comments about the recent PHP5 adoption talk that's been going around in the PHP community (spurred on by comments made by Matt of the Wordpress project).

Matt brings up some good points. What might be limiting PHP 5 adoption, could just be the lack of interest in developers. [...] Up until reading his rant, I've lived in a box where everyone I've talked to, used and enjoyed PHP 5 and its vast extensions. Developing in PHP 5.0 was uneventfully, but you learn to appreciate PHP 5 with the core inclusion of PDO with PHP 5.1. PHP 5 is not without annoyances. In the core developers attempts to "better" the language, they made changes that broke code that previously worked.

He looks at a few of the items for debate surrounding the move from PHP4 to PHP5 including the extensions that come bundled with PHP5, solving the register_globals issue, and a brief mention of the Standard PHP Library.

Gregory Szorc has posted his look at the "many untapped features" that PHP has to offer that the masses can tend to overlook when developing applications, specifically when dealing with object versus procedural programming.

The more interesting topic is why these applications have not made the jump to utilize PHP 5's features. Others have speculated, and I tend to agree, that application developers are worried that PHP 5 adoption is too low and requiring its use will turn away users. Now, considering the improvements of the PHP 5 engine, both from a performance and security standpoint, there is no reason in my mind why a sane system administrator wouldn't be running PHP 5.2.1 (most recent at the time of this entry).

He looks at applications like WordPress, Drupal and Gallery and note how they haven't made the move to true PHP5-style code. Adoption has a lot to do with this, but he brings up the point of the article - that developers are "ignorant" to what they're missing.

Nexen.net has posted the latest PHP statistics for the month of March 2007 today including the PHP version distribution, the usage of different versions of PHP, PHP 5 adoption by country, and much more.

Here are the PHP stats for March 2007. To learn about methodology, read la section phpversion. 10.1 millions servers hosted on 2.3 millions IP were surveyed during December, and 22.8 were used for stats : domaines without web sites, those unreachable, ISP, shared hosters or domain parkings were not considered.

Also included are the evolution statistics comparing PHP to two other languages - ASP amd Masque. Interestingly enough, the growth pattern almost directly matches the inverse of the ASP results.

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results of their latest question to the community - which of the options given is the main hindrance for PHP5's adoption.

Options included "PHP5 does not support CMS", "PHP5 is slow", and "PHP4 fulfills all the needs". The option that came out on top, however, was "The user's ISP is old and not updated to support newer versions" with 49.5 percent of the votes. Coming in behind it was the "none" option which might suggest that PHP5 adoption isn't all that slow anymore.

They've also started up their newest poll asking which of the listed features are ones that developers would like to see in PHPUnit the most (including the options "Mutation testing" and "support for distributed testing").

The International PHP Magazine has posted results from their latest poll conducted over this past week asking which, of their given options, is the best helpful hint for creating a web application in PHP.

Two of the options ranked higher than the rest with one (Page/object caching) coming out on top of the other (Don't save performance testing for the end of the project). The remainder of the votes were divided pretty evenly between the last three options: "Use multi result set queries to your database", "gzip compression", and "Tune your web server".

While you're in the polling mood, you should check out this week's new poll that wonders which of their options might be the biggest hindrance to PHP5's adoption in the community.

From Dotvoid.com, there's a new posting talking about the continued use of PHP4 by developers and hosting companies and how it's effecting the community as a whole.

It is true that the PHP 5 uptake has been slow. Many internet service providers as well as many developers are reluctant to switch. This is probably, as others have stated, a circular dependency.

As ISP:s are reluctant to upgrade the popular open source projects are hesitant to upgrade. I still think the wrong people are worried. Still PHP 5 is increasing it's share and finally the day will come when version 4 will be considered legacy. Hopefully before PHP 6 is here but not necessarily.

He continues on, talking about what PHP5 is really about (it's not just the objects!) and things that can help make it an easier sell to those still lagging in a PHP4 world - like the Zend Framework.

Nexen.net has posted their latest statistics for PHP for the month of January (2007), showing the status of PHP as of the end of last year - December 2006.

Here are the PHP stats for December 2006. To learn about methodology, read la section phpversion. 19 millions servers hosted on 2,2 millions IP were surveyed during December, and 9,2 were used for stats : domaines without web sites, those unreachable, ISP, shared hosters or domain parkings were not considered.

The stats are pretty exhaustive and include:

• PHP's share of the internet
• PHP adoption by country
• Apache adoption by country
• PHP adoption by IP address