On the Engine Yard blog Davey Shafik has a new post celebrating ten years of PHP 5 as of July 13th, 2014:

Ten years ago yesterday on July 13th 2004, PHP 5.0.0 was unleashed onto the world. Bringing with it the Zend Engine 2, effectively a brand new PHP. [...] The truth is that until PHP 5, PHP was a mostly procedural language, while it supported classes and objects, they were a bolt-on feature. This history is still visible in the majority of its default feature set even today — including some of its newest additions like the new password hashing API.

He talks about the evolution of PHP even since version 5.0.0 and how other technologies, like Ruby on Rails, has influenced the language and its developers towards greater things. He shares his answers to a few questions including:

What is the most significant change to PHP in the last 10 years?
• What's the biggest change in the community in the last 10 years?
• What's the most pressing issue for PHP?
• What would you like to see in the next major version?

He also includes an infographic of the timeline that lead up to the PHP 5.0.0 release and the advancements since then. There's even a look at the "Future of PHP" with some emerging technologies and what might lie in store for "PHP 6" (whatever that may end up being).

Congratulations go out to Derick Rethans for the outstanding work he's done on XDebug for the last ten years. From his latest blog post:

Today it has been ten years since the first release of Xdebug: version 0.7.0. I would like to celebrate this tenth anniversary with a new release: Xdebug 2.2.0. Xdebug 2.2 adds support for PHP 5.4 and provides some new features.

There's five new things on his list of updates in this latest release:

• Colours on the command line
• Better support for closures in stack and function traces
• The size of arrays is now shown with the overloaded variable output
• Added the method call type to xdebug_get_function_stack
• Extra information to error printouts to tell that the error suppression operator has been ignored due to xdebug.scream

If you've found XDebug handy for testing and finding those tough to track bugs over the years, you should consider buying "support" to show Derick your appreciation (oh, and you also get a "first in" preference on your XDebug questions)!

As Andi Gutmans mentions on his blog, the Zend Framework has reached the 10 million downloads mark and is still going strong:

When I started the Zend Framework project back in 2005 I was sure that we could make a difference. Some thought it was a long shot with too ambitious goals, after all I wanted to start from scratch without a single line of code, no community contributors and no corporate contributors. We are now 3.5 years later and I have to say Zend Framework's success has exceeded my own foresight and expectations.

He mentions the teams behind the Framework and some of Zend's partners that have helped to make it an amazing success.

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.

On the lighter side of the language, Antony Dovgal has posted ten commandments that PHP developers should follow including:

• Thou shalt obey the Release Master.
• Thou shalt not forget to add comments to thy code, especially if the code is tricky.
• Thou shalt not fix a bug only in one of the branches unless it did not exist in the others.
• Thou shalt discuss all new features in internals@.

IMO it's time to make the development process more organized. This is my version of what I would like to see as an official set of rules for PHP community.

On the lighter side of the language, Antony Dovgal has posted ten commandments that PHP developers should follow including:

• Thou shalt obey the Release Master.
• Thou shalt not forget to add comments to thy code, especially if the code is tricky.
• Thou shalt not fix a bug only in one of the branches unless it did not exist in the others.
• Thou shalt discuss all new features in internals@.

IMO it's time to make the development process more organized. This is my version of what I would like to see as an official set of rules for PHP community.

Over on the ThinkingPHP Blog, Felix Geisendorfer has posted several items to his blog in a his series of Ten Days of Free Dessert with some useful tips about using the CakePHP Framework.

I'm announcing the "10 Days of free Dessert!". This basically means that I'll post at least 1 useful and easy to adapt CakePHP tip begining tomorrow for the next 10 days. I will try to pick things you might not have heard before and that didn't get a lot of loving from the docs team so far.

Here's the listing so far:

• The 7 Crucials of CRUD
• Become Friends with the Inflector
• Generate a Random Password
• Keep Your Cake Fresh (use SVN HEAD)
• Keep a Custom Configuration File
• MySQL & UTF-8
• Conventions over Ego
• Render Custom Errors
• Graceful Error Handling
• Default Models, Components, and Helpers
• Welcome back, Friendly URLs
• Debugging requestAction
• A Simple Config Model The New XML Class

Each of the posts contains a description of the feature and some code to show how it's done. It's a great, handy little series of posts for any CakePHP developer to keep in their toolkit to pull from later on.

Over on the ThinkingPHP Blog, Felix Geisendorfer has posted several items to his blog in a his series of Ten Days of Free Dessert with some useful tips about using the CakePHP Framework.

I'm announcing the "10 Days of free Dessert!". This basically means that I'll post at least 1 useful and easy to adapt CakePHP tip begining tomorrow for the next 10 days. I will try to pick things you might not have heard before and that didn't get a lot of loving from the docs team so far.

Here's the listing so far:

• The 7 Crucials of CRUD
• Become Friends with the Inflector
• Generate a Random Password
• Keep Your Cake Fresh (use SVN HEAD)
• Keep a Custom Configuration File
• MySQL & UTF-8
• Conventions over Ego
• Render Custom Errors
• Graceful Error Handling
• Default Models, Components, and Helpers
• Welcome back, Friendly URLs
• Debugging requestAction
• A Simple Config Model The New XML Class

Each of the posts contains a description of the feature and some code to show how it's done. It's a great, handy little series of posts for any CakePHP developer to keep in their toolkit to pull from later on.

Justin Silverton shares withus today ten easy tips for speeding up your PHP applications with Apache.

The suggestions include things like:

• Enabling compression of HTML with the output_handler settings in your php.ini
• Move from file-based sessions to shared memory sessions
• Use output buffering
• Don't use images when text will do

Some of the suggestions are just general web development items (such as that last one), but some web developers out there need to be reminded of them. There are still too many image only sites out there...

Justin Silverton shares withus today ten easy tips for speeding up your PHP applications with Apache.

The suggestions include things like:

• Enabling compression of HTML with the output_handler settings in your php.ini
• Move from file-based sessions to shared memory sessions
• Use output buffering
• Don't use images when text will do

Some of the suggestions are just general web development items (such as that last one), but some web developers out there need to be reminded of them. There are still too many image only sites out there...