As anyone who subscribes to the php.internals mailing list knows, there can be a lot of drama around some of the discussions for the future of the language, both in its features and surrounding technical concerns. Daniel Cousineau has posted a lighter take on some of this drama and is issuing his own "RFC" for a proposed mascot for internals - the DramaLlama.

Branding and PR is an increasingly important factor in programming language viability and adoption. Visible instability in the core team is off-putting to large organizations who depend on long term reliability and support and only encourages them to look to languages and tools with more stable and professional core teams. This RFC proposes that the PHP core team get ahead of the issue and introduce a logo, separate from the public facing project, to provide a sense of professionalism that is lacking. I humbly submit the DramaLlama as the superior candidate.

His proposed mascot, shown here, bears the PHP logo on the side of a cartoon purple llama. As Daniel puts it, the llama is a "proud, capable animal" that can deal with a lot and still stand up under a heavy burden.

By not adopting a logo, the PHP core team risks losing the respect and trust of the end user community. However it could be argued that the core team has survived without this and could do so indefinitely.

The post is practically dripping with sarcasm, but it's a good mood-lightener around some of the drama that can come from the clash of multiple personalities in the PHP internals community.

If you've been around the PHP community for any length of time, chances are you've seen the ElePHPant stuffed animals that have been floating around conferences and living on developers' desks. Well, the Zend Framework has decided to create some of their own - a more green variety. Pádraic Brady has posted about them.

Blue PHP ElePHPant plush toys are so yesterday. Ben Scholzen (you might know him as DASPRiD on IRC/Twitter) is now taking pre-orders for green Zend Framework ElePHPants. Yes, they are green. Yes, they have “ZF” printed on them. No, they are not a repository of Zend Framework knowledge. We tried really hard, but Intel insists that magical toys from the future are not real. Ben needs to reach a minimum production order of 1000 small ZF ElePHPants and is currently hovering at around 200 after the weekend. If you, your user group, or your pet poodle want one of these, visit Ben’s pre-order page for more information.

As of the time of this post, the orders for these elePHPants is at about 190 out of the 1000 needed, so if you'd like to pick some up, get over and put in your pre-order now!

So you've seen all of the pictures of the elePHPants floating around and want to get your hands on one of your very own? Good news! Damien Seguy and crew have another fresh batch of huggable blue PHPness on the way and you can place your order now:

If you have missed the boat of the first generation of elePHPants, now is the right time to catchup up and participate to the 2008 generation! As for the first generation, this project is open to every PHP User group and aficionados, that want to adopt elePHPants, small or big.

Pricing is 4 Euros per elephant (in a 50 count box only) or 50 Euro for one of the larger elephants. They're even open to having company logos ("your own brood") added to the other side of his back. You can find more details on getting your hands on one at this page on the Nexen.net website or just head right to the order form to get a little blue PHPer to call your own.

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.

In a new blog entry Philip Olson takes a look back at the "brief history" of the PHP logo and how its evolved over the years the language has been around.

PHP 4.0.0 added main/logo.h which contains the logos themselves (as text (a bunch of numbers (magic))) so I checked out every version of this file from CVS, parsed them to create the images, sorted by version/size, then wrote this blog post.

When the language started out there wasn't much in the way of a logo until PHP3 came around. Philip shows some of these early prototypes (most of which look nothing like the familiar purple oval of today). Things evolved with PHP4 and jokes were even played with the area inside the shape - everything from developers and dogs to bunnies showed up at different times of year or with special URLs.

As has been mentioned by several bloggers out there, the eZ Components project now has its own official website for the community to center around. It includes updates on the project, documentation and an area detailing the development process and guidelines.

Derick Rethans comments:

he website will be enhanced with other features, such as dedicated RSS feeds, case studies, links to external articles and more. Together with the new website the project also gets a new logo, of which you can see one variant right in this post.

This new logo is on the new website as well as being available for download in a variety of useful formats.

As has been mentioned by several bloggers out there, the eZ Components project now has its own official website for the community to center around. It includes updates on the project, documentation and an area detailing the development process and guidelines.

Derick Rethans comments:

he website will be enhanced with other features, such as dedicated RSS feeds, case studies, links to external articles and more. Together with the new website the project also gets a new logo, of which you can see one variant right in this post.

This new logo is on the new website as well as being available for download in a variety of useful formats.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted about a new contest to his blog today centering around the phpOpenTracker software.

After two years in which I did not have the time to work on it, the development of phpOpenTracker is slowly commencing again. The first step to restart the development has been the migration from BerliOS to a Trac setup that is generously provided by Tobias Schlitt.

While setting up Trac it occured to me that I do not have a logo for phpOpenTracker. To get to such a logo I try something new: I ask you to participate in the phpOpenTracker Logo Contest.

He sets up some rules for the competition including that the design should convey flexibility and that the winner's work will go under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license. Check out the post, though, for the full details on rules and submission guidelines.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted about a new contest to his blog today centering around the phpOpenTracker software.

After two years in which I did not have the time to work on it, the development of phpOpenTracker is slowly commencing again. The first step to restart the development has been the migration from BerliOS to a Trac setup that is generously provided by Tobias Schlitt.

While setting up Trac it occured to me that I do not have a logo for phpOpenTracker. To get to such a logo I try something new: I ask you to participate in the phpOpenTracker Logo Contest.

He sets up some rules for the competition including that the design should convey flexibility and that the winner's work will go under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license. Check out the post, though, for the full details on rules and submission guidelines.

From Cclair.nl, there's a new post sharing some code that's been created in an effort to make a "more modern CAPTCHA".

"ModernCaptcha" is a simple script in order to prevent spam in a very user friendly way. In a few words, your visitors don't have to type some characters as you see on the most websites, the verification is made by choosing the company name belonging to the logo that is show.

It's an interesting approach, but, as one reader pointed out, bots has a one in five chance of guessing correctly. That's way less than with a more standard image manipulation CAPTCHA method. I'm not sure I'd want to use it on my sites, but it might be good for a smaller site.

There's a demo of the end result and a download of the latest version as well as some limited support provided in the comments of the post.