Recently the Xdebug PHP debugging tool turned 15 and PHP community member Cal Evans wanted to do something special for the author, Derick Rethans. He started a secret fundraiser to gather contributions from all around the community and used the funds to purchase Derick several bottles of his favorite beverage. In this new post to his site Cal shares some about XDebug, Derick and a video of James Titcumb presenting Derick with his present.

There are a handful of tools that have actually changed how many of us code PHP. XDebug is one of those tools[1]. There is no doubt of the impact that XDebug has has on PHP developers and PHP projects.

Recently, XDebug turned 15. This means that the man responsible for XDebug, Derick Rethans, has been supporting XDebug for 15 years, for free. [...] So on this the (close to) anniversary of this product, many of us in the PHP community decided to do something to show Derick how much we appreciate it. Those that know him know that Derick loves a good Scotch. So we decided to buy him some.

Cal has the video embedded in the post (or here on YouTube) and offers thanks to the people and groups that helped to make the project successful.

On the Laravel News site there's a post announcing the official fifth birthday of Laravel, a framework that has definitely made its mark on the community in that short amount of time.

Five years ago today Taylor announced the first release of Laravel to the world. [...] Even though a lot has changed and improved since that first release the code still has that same feel. Like all newborns that first release was very minimal–no controllers, no Eloquent, no templating system. It had enough to get you started but lacked the niceties we now enjoy.

The post also lists some of the things that didn't start out in the framework but have been added since including: Blade, Collections, Eloquent, Queues and Middleware support.

Happy birthday Laravel and a big thank you to Taylor and the entire community.

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.

PHPDeveloper.org has come a long way over the past eight years (we'll turn eight in August!) and this post marks our ten thousandth post in our quest to bring you the best news and community happenings for all things PHP. I never would have figured that this site would turn into what it was, especially back when I was only making one post a day that summarized everything back in college.

I'd like to thank all of those that have helped me along the way (you know who you are) to make this site even better and to help provide quality content. And, of course, to the readers out there - without you we wouldn't be what we are. A fun fact - PHPDeveloper.org is, as of right now, sitting at the #1 spot on Google's results for both "php news" and "php developer". Our traffic is split pretty well with around 42% coming from Google, about 32% from referring sites and 24% being direct requests to the site. That's not even counting our RSS feed - we get around 60,000 requests for that each day alone!

I thought I'd honor the occasion with some statistics to walk down memory lane and share live before 10k:

Total characters in all news posts:
11,450,469

Total comments:
68,661 (65,517 of those are spam)

Top Five Months by Posts:
08/2006 - 265
06/2006 - 252
10/2005 - 227
10/2006 - 224
05/2006 - 216

Top Five Posts by Views:
06.28.2006 - Tutorial: An Introduction to OOP in PHP (47018 views)
06.07.2005 - Community News: A Decade of PHP (30810 views)
03.05.2006 - Community News: The PHP Community Responds to the Framework (29882 views)
08.20.2006 - PHP-Tools Blog: New releases of patTemplate and patForms (29009 views)
09.06.2005 - Community News: Joomla! Project Announced (28841 views)

Thank you to all of our readers over the last eight years!

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.

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.