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.

Three years ago today, I published my first Getting Started with Zend Framework tutorial. This was the announcement. Back then, Zend Framework was at version 0.1.5 and a considerably smaller download than now :)

You can grab the latest version of the tutorial (supporting ZF 1.9) from his site as well as pick up a copy of the Zend Framework in Action book he co-authored.

• Ilia Alshanetsky - PHP is 14 Today
• Marco Tabini - At 14, is PHP Finally Growing Up?
• As well as lots of traffic on Twitter

You can find out more about the "roots" of the language on its wikipedia page. Don't look now but the five year anniversary of the first PHP5 is coming up fast too!

The oracle.c and oracle.h files for the "oracle" PHP extension were checked into the php/fi 2.0 source code by Stig Bakken on this day in 1997.

Chris mentions the directions the extension has headed, when "oci8" became the standard over "oracle" and the PDO driver/extension. You can find more on using PHP & Oracle in the Underground Manual and the PHP Developer Center on the Oracle Technology Network.

One frequently received suggestion is to redesign the site. As I explained before, changing the site design is not a big issue. The greatest challenge is to change the current design to another that pleases more users than the number of users the change may displease.

So, to keep things interesting, he's had a contest out of it with the winner, besides having their design applied to the site, will get their every own elePHPant and a prize of at least $1000 USD. The winning design will be the main one for the site, but it is possible that paying subscribers could have the ability to define their own.

More to come on the contest in the following weeks...

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.

I am always looking for any suggestions for improvements to the installer. I'm also curious how people are using it; is it just for personal development, or is there anyone using it to deploy to a group of desktops or servers?

According to the original message on the php.internals list, John based it off of the functionality of the installer of Phil Driscoll with extra features like selective installation of components, automatic configuration of the php.ini and that it's made as a MSI file (scriptable and open source).

The PHP User Group Frankfurt am Main (PHPUGFFM) will be celebrating its 5th anniversary tomorrow and is planning for a big party, so if you're in the area, be sure to drop by! Well, of course it's a geek party (they're developers, what did you expect? :-)) so there'll be plenty of talks before the actual socializing will start.

Session topics will be Unobtrusive Javascript, $YAJQ ++, PHP Homebanking (the sequel), PHP Dos, Don't and maybes, juicy Joost and ION parser - sounds like a very interesting mix to me.

The meeting will be happening on May 10th there in Frankfurt at around 7:30-8:00pm and will feature some good talks before the party begins. Check out the meeting's entry for complete information.