In a recent post the fifteenth anniversary of the XDebug PHP debugging tool was celebrated and lead developer Derick Rethans was presented with several tokens of appreciation from the PHP community. In this new post to his site he shares the experience (it was a surprise after all) from his perspective and thanks those involved.

This article was going to be about some upcoming features in the 2.6 release. Or rather, I was hoping to announce at least a beta release of Xdebug 2.6. Unfortunately, I couldn't find enough time to work on all the issues that I wanted, although I've made a little progress.

What I can write about, is a little mystery.

He talks about the initial invite from James Titcumb to meet him at his favorite whisky store and the eight special bottles that the community purchased to show their appreciation for his hard fifteen years of work on this invaluable tool. He lists out the types for those interested and some of the messages from contributors showing their appreciation. He thanks all of those involved.

And on the Xdebug front, there are plenty of bugs to fix, features to add for Xdebug 2.6, and undoubtedly Dmitry will be "breaking" some things in PHP 7.2 that I need to support in Xdebug as well.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the language we all know and love (or love to hate) - PHP. Rasmus Lerdorf started the language to "scratch an itch" he needed to make a more dynamic web site. It's grown over the last twenty years into one of the most popular web programming languages. Several members of the PHP community have posted some of their own thoughts about the event:

• Joe Watkins
• Cal Evans
• Chris Hartjes
• Stephan Hochdorfer
• Pascal Martin
• Ben Ramsey
• Davey Shafik
• Anderson Casimiro
• Mark Railton
• AWS PHP SDK Blog
• Amanda Folson
• Michelangelo van Dam
• Anderson Casimiro
• Chris Tankersley
• Shameer C
• Tudor Barbu
• Erika Heidi
• Matthew Weier O'Phinney
• David Carr
• Rafael Dohms
• Derick Rethans
• Wim Godden
• Christian Wenz
• Oscar Merida
• Patrick Stephan
• Rob Allen
• Matthew Setter
• Matt Raines
• Justin Carmony
• Sherif Ramadan
• thePHP.cc
• Laravel News
• Ilia Alshanetsky
• Jordi Boggiano

Also, be sure to check out Ben Ramsey's article on Infoworld too! Have you shared your own thoughts about today? Let us know and we'll add it to the list! Also be sure yo check out everyone that tagged their tweets too!

There's some major news from the Symfony project (with matching post on their blog) worth celebrating - the framework and project are celebrating nine years since the first commits were made by Fabien Potencier himself.

Where does the time go? This milestone reminds us all of how Symfony has become an important part of our professional lives and been changing the way we work with code for almost a decade! (We won’t even talk about the whole "we’re all getting older" thing!) [...] Over the last several years, the Symfony project has completely and continually reinvented itself. Originally a pure MVC framework with some auto-magical features, now it's both a set of decoupled components and a full-stack Request-Response framework backed by a vast development community.

They also talk some about the Symfony community and include a special thanks to all of the developers that have contributed their talents, both in code and documentation, to the framework over the years.

Dougal Campbell has a new post to his site with his own contribution to the "WordPress 10th Anniversary Blogging Project" - a remembrance of his history with the tool and where/when he first started using it.

The official 10th anniversary of the release of WordPress is May 27, 2013. It has been an amazing 10 years, during which WordPress evolved from a simple blogware to a very full-featured CMS (Content Management System), used to power some of the biggest and most popular web sites on the internet. All over the world, people are planning celebrations. As much as I like a good party, I thought this would also be a good time to celebrate WordPress by actually using WordPress — for blogging.

He talks some about when he got started with WordPress (2003) and what's happened since. He suggests that others follow suit and use the "#wp10" hashtag on Twitter to share their own posts.

Rob Allen has reached a milestone in his development life - his Zend Framework tutorial "Getting Started with the Zend Framework"> has hit its three year mark of being published.

Three years ago today, I published my first Getting Started with Zend Framework tutorial. This was the announcement. Back then, Zend Framework was at version 0.1.5 and a considerably smaller download than now :)

You can grab the latest version of the tutorial (supporting ZF 1.9) from his site as well as pick up a copy of the Zend Framework in Action book he co-authored.

Something big happened for PHP yesterday - June 8th marked the fourteenth anniversary of the first release of the language by Rasmus Lerdorf. The birthday was even mentioned as a notable date on the front page of Wikipedia. Some members of the community also commented on the occasion:

• Ilia Alshanetsky - PHP is 14 Today
• Marco Tabini - At 14, is PHP Finally Growing Up?
• As well as lots of traffic on Twitter

You can find out more about the "roots" of the language on its wikipedia page. Don't look now but the five year anniversary of the first PHP5 is coming up fast too!

It's been 12 years since the first Oracle PHP extension was committed and Chris Jones takes a brief look back in his latest blog post.

The oracle.c and oracle.h files for the "oracle" PHP extension were checked into the php/fi 2.0 source code by Stig Bakken on this day in 1997.

Chris mentions the directions the extension has headed, when "oci8" became the standard over "oracle" and the PDO driver/extension. You can find more on using PHP & Oracle in the Underground Manual and the PHP Developer Center on the Oracle Technology Network.

Along with mentioning their 9th anniversary, the PHPClasses.org website has announced a contest for all of those out there who want to help improve the look for the site.

One frequently received suggestion is to redesign the site. As I explained before, changing the site design is not a big issue. The greatest challenge is to change the current design to another that pleases more users than the number of users the change may displease.

So, to keep things interesting, he's had a contest out of it with the winner, besides having their design applied to the site, will get their every own elePHPant and a prize of at least $1000 USD. The winning design will be the main one for the site, but it is possible that paying subscribers could have the ability to define their own.

More to come on the contest in the following weeks...

Many congratulations go out to OmniTI on the celebration of their tenth birthday. As Chris Shiflett puts it:

Earlier this month (on the 4th, to be exact), OmniTI celebrated its 10th birthday. From humble beginnings in Theo's basement to a company of almost 50 employees, things have certainly changed.

Theo Schlossnagle also has his own post about the occasion, remembering the company's origins and what it has become:

On September 4th 1997, Sherry (my mother) and I incorporated OmniTI, Inc. and started doing business. So, naturally, on September 4th this year, clan OmniTI went to a local bar and celebrated being in business for ten years. I didn't prepare a speech, I didn't give a pep-talk; instead, I decided that day was for me. I sat back and looked on with tremendous pride at OmniTI. What is OmniTI? OmniTI is its people and their sacrifices.

OmniTI employs several web known PHPers including Chris Shiflett, Laura Thomson and Wez Furlong.

Many congratulations go out to OmniTI on the celebration of their tenth birthday. As Chris Shiflett puts it:

Earlier this month (on the 4th, to be exact), OmniTI celebrated its 10th birthday. From humble beginnings in Theo's basement to a company of almost 50 employees, things have certainly changed.

Theo Schlossnagle also has his own post about the occasion, remembering the company's origins and what it has become:

On September 4th 1997, Sherry (my mother) and I incorporated OmniTI, Inc. and started doing business. So, naturally, on September 4th this year, clan OmniTI went to a local bar and celebrated being in business for ten years. I didn't prepare a speech, I didn't give a pep-talk; instead, I decided that day was for me. I sat back and looked on with tremendous pride at OmniTI. What is OmniTI? OmniTI is its people and their sacrifices.

OmniTI employs several web known PHPers including Chris Shiflett, Laura Thomson and Wez Furlong.