It's 2009 and several in the PHP community have already started posting their own looks back at last year - here's the list so far:

• Jani Hartikainen: Best of 2008
• Sara Golemon: 2008 Lookback
• Ivo Jansch: Goodbye 2008!
• Stefan Koopmanschap: A look back
• Web Builder Zone: A Year In Retrospect - Web Builder Zone's Top 10 For 2008
• Matthew Weier O'Phinney: 2008: The year in review
• Zend Developer Zone: Year-End Conference Round-Up
• Rob Allen: 2008 end-of-year wrap-up
• Matthew Turland: Another Year, Another Summary
• Travis Swicegood: 2008: a retrospective
• Andi Gutmans: Happy New Year!
• Michelangelo van Dam: Looking back to 2008
• Keith Casey: 2008 Year End Summary
• Chuck Burgess: Looking Back...2008

Keep checking back for more great posts as they're added! Have a post you want on the list? let us know!

2008 was a great year for the PHP community - lots of growth, enhancements and improvements have lead us to where we are today. The language is stronger than ever and attracting more developers than it ever has. Let's take a look at just some of the things that made 2008 what it was:

• Plenty of criticism and comparisons of PHP
• The rise in popularity of the elePHPants
• Growth in the PHP Women group (like the article contest and their 2nd brithday)
• 2008 - the Year of the Framework
• PEAR Bug Traige event
• Zend Framework's Dojo and AMF integration
• A growing emphasis on unit testing and debugging
• The last release in the PHP 4 series
• Ibuildings launches their Center for Expertise (and Cal Evans is appointed Director)
• Several major companies - like Microsoft and Adobe - show more interest in the PHP community
• Lukas Smith launched his emPHPower iniative
• php|architect launched their C7Y community website
• this site made the move to the Solar Framework
• PHPers participated once again in Google's Summer of Code
• PEAR elctions were held
• The Great Namespace Debate of 2008
• Plenty of podcasts were released - PHP Abstract and the P3 Podcast
• php|architect got a major overhaul of the site, the magazine and the structure of the company
• Zend launched a new certification - Zend Framework Certified Engineer
• Zend buyout rumors (no, it didn't happen)
• the elePHPant World Tour
• Continuing development on PHP 5.3

Conferences

• CakeFest
• PHP Brasil
• PHP London
• Dutch PHP Conference
• Zend/PHP Conference & Expo
• php|tek
• php|works/PyWorks
• PHP Quebec
• PHP Appalachia
• FrOSCon
• International PHP Conference
• PHP Camp
• OpenExpo
• PHP North West
• SymfonyCamp
• PHP Barcelona
• PHP Security Camp

Our own job postings

• Included companies like: CNet Networks, Ibuildings, Ning, InvestorGuide.com, Yahoo! and Schematic
• In places like: Paris, UK, Nashville, Barcelona, New York, Zurich, Dallas and Chicago

In her blog today, Alison Holloway offers a quick tip for developers out there trying to install PHP 5.2.2 on their Windows machine and running into trouble. Maybe it's the same issue?

I've just been setting up PHP 5.2.2 on Windows XP Pro, with Apache 2.0.59. I couldn't get Apache to find the correct php.ini file. It was looking in C:Windows, instead of where I installed PHP. The httpd.conf file told Apache to look in C:Program FilesPHP, but it wasn't. So none of the extensions were loading.

The problem? She wasn't putting in the right kind of slashes into her configuration file. It couldn't find the right path because of it. The issue isn't mentioned in the latest version of the Underground PHP and Oracle Manual (but will be in the future).

In his latest blog post Davey Shafik takes a look back at this past year, 2006, and some of the happenings he experienced during that time.

The yearly look back is now a tradition in the PHP community, I decided this year to lead the pack instead of just hopping on the bandwagon. Of course, it's not official until Derick provides his excellent look back on internals.

There's mentions of his work with the Zend Framework, his book (the Zend Study Guide), and much more. Check out the full post if you'd like to catch up...

Sara Golemon has posted her own look back at the year of 2006 in the PHP:

Well, Davey Shafik started us off with his year-end wrapup so I'll follow suit with mine. The thoughts below are mine and mildly influenced by alcohol. They represent a foggy review of how I experienced the year through the imperfect recollection of mailing list archives.

She covers each month, looking at the people, events, and releases that happened in each. Lots of activity happened on the mailing lists mirroring the happenings in the rest of the PHP community. Check out her great post for the full happenings of the year.

IBM developerWorks has posted the second part of their series covering the development of PHP and Ajax to create a photo gallery application. In this part, they work off of the gallery already created in part one, taking care of one issue that plagues Ajax application - the breaking of the back button.

A major challenge of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax)-driven Web sites is the lack of a Back button. We will use JavaScript to create a history stack for the Ajax photo gallery built in Part 1 of this two-part "Developing PHP the Ajax way" series. This history stack will closely mirror the history utility found in Web browsers, and it will be used to provide Back, Forward, and Reload buttons for the application.

They start with a look at what it means to "save state" in the browser, including the use of the Back button to navigate between pages. Seeing that Ajax breaks this, they move ahead with a simple solution - creating an internal history stact for the application and use its own navigation methods. They provide some examples images to use and all of the code you'll need to accomplish this.

They create a class using the popular Prototype javascript library to create functions like do_add, do_back, and do_forward to correctly handle the adding and deleting of the items from the stack. Once that script is developed, they take and integrate it back with the photo gallery from part one.

Des Traynor shares some of his opinions on PHP in his latest blog post - "I hated php back when it was cool".

This is a short smug entry, written in the "Yeah, well I liked them before they even had a record deal" style associated with trend snobs. Except in this case, its the opposite, I am claiming that I hated something back when it was cool. Thanks to blogging my opinion earlier, I even have proof! PHP should stand for Pretty Huge Problem.

He mentions some of the rants, langauge switchers, and general complaints that have come up about PHP, including the combination of code and HTML, the "safe mode" feature, and PHP's "battered on" nature of development. He also goes off a bit on the (inevitable) backlash that Rails and Ajax will see in the future, and wonders how far off it will be.

PHPit.net goes "back to the basics" today with this new post - a look at the basics of how PHP handles arrays and how to use them effectively.

Lately the internet has been on a real fast track, and there have been many new developments, like Ajax, Web 2.0, Tags, and other interesting (and often hyped up) things. But this tutorial won't go there at all, and goes back to the beginning with the basics: using arrays in PHP.

If you're a seasoned PHP developer, who knows arrays like the back of his hand, this might be an article you'd want to skip. But if you're still unsure how arrays work, or if you're just curious about a few things, read on and learn more about arrays in PHP.

This is a very basic article, and doesn't give much in the way of any "array tricks" either. Array functions aren't even covered (mostly) - just how to create and update arrays in your code. But for a beginner, that's all you need...

Robert Peake has a new post today with a brief look at where PHP has come from and some of his opinions on the future of PHP in 2006.

We saw the release of PHP 5.1, the renaming of the CSV trunk to 6.0 (in attempts to beat Perl to the punch, apparently), massive security concerns raised by applications ranging from phpBB to Mambo, Zend's numerous partnerships and announcement of the Zend framework, great improvements to Pear, more conferences, more enthusiasm, more realization from the enterprise that PHP is where web application development is headed.

So, where is PHP going from here?

He predicts that the increased push Zend is making for the framework will continue to help improve PHP's image, especially with some of the hurdles PHP has to overcome (including security issues and getting past other lingering problems from PHP's past).

Derick Rethans has posted his own look back at all of the happenings that went on back in 2005.

Welcome to the fourth installment of the PHP Look Back. Just as in previous years, we'll look back on PHP development discussions, bloopers and accomplishments of the last year. This is not supposed to be a fully objective review of last year--note that the opinions in this article are that of the author, and not of the PHP development team.

He covers each month, giving the happenings for each month, linking to various posts and items in each one. Most of the things discussed are more related to the internal PHP development and discusssions from the mailing lists.