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.

Netcraft.com has posted the results of a web server survey with data compiled starting in 2002 all the way up to 2012 about the growth and usage of PHP on the web. The title of the article, "PHP just grows & grows", gives a clue to their findings.

Netcraft began its Web Server Survey in 1995 and has tracked the deployment of a wide range of scripting technologies across the web since 2001. One such technology is PHP, which Netcraft presently finds on well over 200 million websites.

For those not familiar with the language, they give an overview of its history starting back with PHP v1 that Rasmus Lerdorf developed for his own uses. They move quickly through the years talking about versions and improvements made during their lifecycle. They also talk some about their own tracking methods and the metrics they use to measure PHP's growth - hostnames serving up PHP-based sites, removal of active (not spam) sites, unique IPs and actual computers/machines.

On NetTuts.com today they've posted a good primer for those that may have heard about the PSR standards that have been introduced to PHP but aren't quire sure what they are (or what they mean to you as a developer).

If you're an avid PHP developer, it's quite likely that you've come across the abbreviation, PSR, which stands for "PHP Standards Recommendation." At the time of this writing, there are four of them: PSR-0 to PSR-3. Let's take a look at what these are, and why you should care (and participate).

They start with a brief history of the standards, the PHP-FIG (Framework Interoperability Group) and where the idea for the PSRs came from. Then the article gets into the details of each:

• PSR-0: Autoloader Standard
• PSR-1: Basic Coding Standard
• PSR-2: Coding Style Guide
• PSR-3: Logger Interface

They also do a good job mentioning some of the criticism that's come with the standards and what sort of future there is including the creation of a standard for a HTTP messaging package.

On the Pro Developer site today there's a new post looking at the past and future of FuelPHP a framework started by Dan Horigan and Phil Sturgeon (who have both since left the team).

FuelPHP was first framework which used namespaces and was production ready at the same time. Small footprint, flexibility, namespaces, modularity and other gears make this framework great for building web applications. [...] For FuelPHP team 2012 was year with ups and downs. Dan Horigan was not available for his team members few months and no one didn't know where he was. He show up on the twitter and then he was unreachable again. WanWizard (Harro Verton) and Jelmer Schreuder were most active at the building FuelPHP core and they done a great job.

He takes a look at the road ahead (FuelPHP v2) and the work that's already been done on it. He also notes that another of the core team members has left the FuelPHP development group a few days ago and that there were some things about the framework he no longer liked. The post suggests looking into something like Laravel (v4, not yet released) if you're shopping for a new framework. He does note that, while the future of FuelPHP may be rocky, it is a stable framework and is still a solid choice for a platform (especially if it's already in use).

In this new post Lee Blue has gone through and compared Ruby and PHP in a "year end review" of their current statuses and what each of them have to offer:

Now that I've been working with Ruby in much more depth and both PHP and Ruby have matured dramatically over the past five years it is time to reevaluate the comparison. The previous article was primarily centered around the languages themselves and was not a showdown between any particular frameworks. In this review we will touch a bit more on frameworks, but in the context of a high level review of the two different landscapes of PHP vs Ruby for web development. We will not be getting down to feature-by-feature detail.

He talks a bit about the history and purpose of each of the languages and a good bit about the web frameworks that are available for each (hint: the PHP options are quite a bit more). He also talks about web hosting vs web application hosting and then compares the two languages with a "score card".

The bottom line, as always, is pick the solution that is right for you and your development team. My hope is that this article was helpful in shedding some light on the strengths of both PHP and Ruby, spreading the word about what is available to both languages, and helping you decide what is right for your next project.

On Reddit.com there's a new post that throws you back to a different time in PHP's life - back to 1996 when PHP was still in version 3:

I was lurking one day on Usenet Perl forums when I saw an announcement about the release of PHP 2.0/FI, the first truly public version of PHP. I was growing weary of trying to get PERL working via CGI and fell in love immediately with how simple and fault-tolerant mod_php with Apache was compared to CGI hell. In 1996, they didn't have sites like reddit when I was a noob. They didn't even have Google when I first learned PHP (years before google existed). Hell! php.net's search functionality barely worked. I don't remember there be any real documentation until after PHP 4 came out in mid-2000.

Other people have added their own memories to the post, mentioning how they started out with the language and some opinions on its current state.

Sebastian Bergmann has shared a presentation he originally gave at an Etsy event covering some of the history behind the popular PHPUnit tool and the development it's been through.

When Noah Sussman asked me to give a Code as Craft Technology Talk last week when I was consulting for Etsy I immediately said yes. [...] Just like with a talk that I gave last year, I suddenly had a chain of associations in my head that I just had to follow. And down the rabbit hole I went once more ...

He talks about the origins of PHPUnit (and mentions a few other tools), the move from PHP4 to PHP5, a change in version control from SVN to Git and features of the tool including mock objects and data providers. He also notes that not all tests are "good tests" and how, sometimes, backwards compatibility breaks are a good thing.

The International PHP Conference has posted the video they recorded at their 2010 event of Pierre Joye and Johann-Peter Hartmann's keynote presentation "PHP: Yesterday's Scala and the Cobol of Tomorrow".

PHP came a long way, and we are no longer the cool new kid on the block. On the other hand side we are still far away from being the new cobol, and there is a lot of great stuff going on inside php and the php community. What happened to PHP the last few years, what is happening right now and what will be the next 5 years? Is PHP ready for nowadays trends? Does it fit for Social Web, NoSQL and HTML 5? Should You better be learning Scala right now?

The video runs about 45 minutes and compares some of the features Scala offers, a brief history of PHP, some of the trends of current development and where PHP needs to go in the future to keep up with trends.

As a part of one of her projects, Lorna Mitchell had a need to deploy database patches as a part of her overall deployment process. Obviously, doing this manually every time can be a hassle so she came up with a script that does the work for her (based on a patch_history table).

My current project (BiteStats, a simple report of your google analytics data) uses a basic system where there are numbered patches, and a patch_history table with a row for every patch that was run, showing the version number and a timestamp. When I deploy the code to production, I have a script that runs automatically to apply the patches.

The script uses the number-based patch names (such as patch1.sql) and finds the latest ones that haven't been applied based on the highest values for the patch_number column in the database. This number is updated by the patches themselves when they're run to avoid any confusion in the script itself. She has it running as a part of her phing build process as a part of a Zend Framework application.

On his blog Sebastian Bergmann has a recent post about how he's visualizing PHPUnit's development and pushing that information into a video based on the history of the project.

According to svn.php.net, I committed the first PHPUnit code to cvs.php.net on November 27th 2001 and the first release, PHPUnit 0.1, was made on December 1st 2001. [...] On December 26th 2009, I moved the development of PHPUnit from svn.phpunit.de to GitHub. I imported the history from Subversion into Git. As you can see in the video, moving to GitHub lead to an increased number of contributions to PHPUnit.

You can watch the video either embedded in his post or directly from Vimeo. It's interesting to watch the progress of the application and see the contributions make to each of the parts. The whole video, spanning the entire commit history of the tool, lasts about 25 minutes.