With the passing of PHP's 15th birthday recently, Marco Tabini has taken the opportunity to share some of his opinions on where the language has come from and where he sees it going in the future.

Milestones are not as important in our industry as they are in our lives - the way I see it, if you work in the computer field and turn to look at back at what has been, someone will have passed you by - but there are some very important lessons that can be learned from the story of PHP.

He talks about PHP's direction (and sometimes lack there of), what developers from other languages think about PHP and some of what it will take to get both the community and the PHP development group to step up and overcome the challenges to making the future of the language better.

Happy birthday to one of the web's most popular web scripting languages! As Johannes Schluter mentions in a new post to his blog, PHP turned 15 years od on June 8th - the day Rasmus first announced PHP 1.0.

I can't remember when I first went online. Out from the local BBS systems into the wide open net. It must have been around the same time. But soon I figured out that I needed my own homepage, so I created one, using black fonts on a green (#00ff00) background. I was proud. [...] My brother, who setup our Linux box at home but didn't know much about Apache, had the pragmatic solution: PHP worked. So what did I do? - Learn PHP. And I loved it.

Over fifteen years old now and still going strong, PHP has become one of the top five popular languages and his proven itself again and again in both web applications and in the sites of larger companies to be a reliable, robust solution and one that's not going anywhere anytime soon.

Here's a few other sites with thoughts on this milestone for PHP:

• SitePoint - PHP is Fifteen Today!

The PHP Women group has celebrated their second birthday this past Friday (October 24th) and have seen tons of progress of women in the PHP community during that time. This includes:

• Representation at conferences
• Continued success with our Big Sis Mentorship Program
• Growth in our IRC channel
• Formalizing our non-profit status
• Encouraging women to submit CfPs and to be published

So stop by wish them a happy birthday and see what they're all about!

According to Brian Moon's blog today, the popular PHP forum package Phorum has hit the 10 year mark in its development:

So, I am at the MySQL Conference this week with my Phorum co-developers. We got to talking last night about how old Phorum is. We knew it was about 10 years. We pulled up some old archived zip file of version 1.5 and found in the this in the comment block. "* Created 04/16/1998" Whoa! That means that yesterday was the 10th birthday of the Phorum project.

The current version of Phorum is 5.2 stable and can be downloaded directly from their site.

Jakob Westhoff has posted about a birthday one of the PHP user groups is celebrating - the PHP Usergroup Dortmund:

I'm writing this blog article from the HiccUp Dortmund, where our birthday meeting takes place. [...] Nearly all our oldies are present today to commemorate this anniversary.

You can get more information on the group and the wheres and whens of their next meetup over on the user group's page (including links to current information about several of the group's members).

Following up on Philip Olson's post about the evolution of PHP logos, Wolfgang Drews (of DynamicWebPages.de) has posted a few other examples.

Philip Olson has posted some kind of history of php-logos, so here are my two cents.

Included in his post are things like a 3D rendered example of a PHP booth, a few random ones he found that he had created for his site and the infamous PHP cake from the ten year birthday of the language.

Ligaya Turmelle over at PHPWomen has posted on their 1st birthday.

In that one year we have set up this site, been to 2 conferences sending 2 people who would not of normally been able to go, handed out t-shirts at those conferences, grown a member list of 250+ strong and made some really strong connections to the PHP Community as a whole.

She continues to give thanks to many of the PHPWomen contributors, members, and supporters that have helped in these past twelve months. Happy Birthday PHPWomen!

Many congrats to the folks over at Ning on hitting the two year mark! David Sklar posts about it:

The past two years have been a lot of work and a lot of fun. It's been gratifying to see the crazy, heartwarming, innovative uses folks have come up with for the platform and also extremely rewarding to work with such talented people.

He points out other bloggers who have mentioned this great event - Diego Doval and Gina Bianchini (on the official Ning blog).

As Sara Golemon points out on her blog today, it's the 7th birthday of the very first release of PHP4:

Check the official releases page for yourself. PHP 4.0.0 was released seven years ago today. Make a cake, blow out some candles, and put on your birthday suit (no not that one); Now give that brat a kick out the door, he's been loafing around on your server for too long.

Of course, if you're still stuck in the PHP4 days, there's the latest - PHP 4.4.7 - or, if you're ready to join the rest of the world, PHP 5.2.2.

A happy thing happened one year ago today - the PHP community was given the gift of symfony. Today (the 19th) marks the one year birthday of the launch of the symfony website and project.

The website was launched on October 19th, 2005, and it has rapidly gained a tremendous success. The adoption rate of the framework has been incredible since the beginning, and went far beyond our hopes. Today, we read about symfony in the press and on the Internet every day, new websites using it launch in many countries. We read a lot of very positive reviews about the framework but, more important, we read or hear about successful projects using symfony, and these real use cases are a proof that the framework reaches its goals.

Many congrats go out to the entire team over there! Keep up the great work!