Milestones are not as important in our industry as they are in our lives - the way I see it, if you work in the computer field and turn to look at back at what has been, someone will have passed you by - but there are some very important lessons that can be learned from the story of PHP.

He talks about PHP's direction (and sometimes lack there of), what developers from other languages think about PHP and some of what it will take to get both the community and the PHP development group to step up and overcome the challenges to making the future of the language better.

I can't remember when I first went online. Out from the local BBS systems into the wide open net. It must have been around the same time. But soon I figured out that I needed my own homepage, so I created one, using black fonts on a green (#00ff00) background. I was proud. [...] My brother, who setup our Linux box at home but didn't know much about Apache, had the pragmatic solution: PHP worked. So what did I do? - Learn PHP. And I loved it.

Over fifteen years old now and still going strong, PHP has become one of the top five popular languages and his proven itself again and again in both web applications and in the sites of larger companies to be a reliable, robust solution and one that's not going anywhere anytime soon.

Here's a few other sites with thoughts on this milestone for PHP:

• SitePoint - PHP is Fifteen Today!

• Representation at conferences
• Continued success with our Big Sis Mentorship Program
• Growth in our IRC channel
• Formalizing our non-profit status
• Encouraging women to submit CfPs and to be published

So stop by wish them a happy birthday and see what they're all about!

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.

I'm writing this blog article from the HiccUp Dortmund, where our birthday meeting takes place. [...] Nearly all our oldies are present today to commemorate this anniversary.

You can get more information on the group and the wheres and whens of their next meetup over on the user group's page (including links to current information about several of the group's members).

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 that one year we have set up this site, been to 2 conferences sending 2 people who would not of normally been able to go, handed out t-shirts at those conferences, grown a member list of 250+ strong and made some really strong connections to the PHP Community as a whole.

The past two years have been a lot of work and a lot of fun. It's been gratifying to see the crazy, heartwarming, innovative uses folks have come up with for the platform and also extremely rewarding to work with such talented people.

He points out other bloggers who have mentioned this great event - Diego Doval and Gina Bianchini (on the official Ning blog).

Check the official releases page for yourself. PHP 4.0.0 was released seven years ago today. Make a cake, blow out some candles, and put on your birthday suit (no not that one); Now give that brat a kick out the door, he's been loafing around on your server for too long.

Of course, if you're still stuck in the PHP4 days, there's the latest - PHP 4.4.7 - or, if you're ready to join the rest of the world, PHP 5.2.2.

The website was launched on October 19th, 2005, and it has rapidly gained a tremendous success. The adoption rate of the framework has been incredible since the beginning, and went far beyond our hopes. Today, we read about symfony in the press and on the Internet every day, new websites using it launch in many countries. We read a lot of very positive reviews about the framework but, more important, we read or hear about successful projects using symfony, and these real use cases are a proof that the framework reaches its goals.

Many congrats go out to the entire team over there! Keep up the great work!