This great collection of classes was in my eyes the first real useful library which delivered the solution to most of the basic / standard problems in PHP based software projects. [...] The easy implementation of DB-abstraction, template engine, authentication, permissions, session management and others made it easy to handle these problems in a standardized way. The strict object oriented code gave the developer the necessary flexibility to customize and extend the code where he/she needs it.

This year is (about) the ten year mark for the existence of the language and several commentors on the post remember the "good ole days" of PHP3 sessions, permissions and even the first version of Zend's website.

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.