Richard Heyes has pointed out an interesting little app that Lucas Baltes created to visually show the timeline of PHP releases from now back.

The timeline stretches all the way from the current PHP 5 release (bye bye PHP 4) back to some of the initial releases Rasmus made as the "PHP Tools version 1.0" back in 1995. Each entry is timestamped with when it was released and some of the more recent ones have "tails" showing how long their life lasted.

Lucas also links to the museum on the PHP.net website where all of these versions can be downloaded.

Philip Olson has posted a brief history of one of the more infamous features of PHP on its fifth birthday - register_globals:

It's been a long road and exactly five years (35 releases) since the much discussed and highly controversial PHP directive register_globals has been disabled by default in PHP. After sifting through the mailing list archives, the following set of information has been compiled. Feel free to make additions, corrections, and report register_globals memories!

His list includes some recent "tidbits" about the directive (including the fact that there's still lots of code in the PHP CVS repository that requires register_globals to be on). Following that, there's his brief timeline of the directive's progression - from its infancy as gpc_globals all the way up to more recent events - like its removal from the PHP 6 HEAD CVS versions. With the release of this next major version of PHP, "the beast" can finally be laid to rest.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new article about the latest offering when it comes to the Framework - the introduction of a bug tracker/source browser application on the Framework's site to help manage the project.

The post also includes some screenshots from the application, showcasing each of its many pages of functionality - source browser, issue tracker, timeline, and the search function.

For direct access to the site, head over to the Zend Framework site and click on the Developer tab.

Greg Beaver, frustrated with the bug tracker offerings out there, has taken the pearweb bug tracking system and modified it for use on his main project - the Chiara_PEAR_Server - as a bugtracker/timeline system.

You can grab a download of this project directly from the PEAR website and follow Greg's six simple steps to get it up and running.