Ben Ramsey has a new post to his site where he reviews the "eras" of PHP that it's gone through in the past few years and ends up with what he calls the "Era of Testing" - the recent strong push that's being made to promote and encourage unit testing in PHP applications.

Over the past decade, the PHP community has progressed through a handful of distinct eras that have each been marked by a focus on specific best practices. This is most evident in the types of talks presented at conferences and user groups and in the articles published by php|architect magazine, PHPDeveloper.org, and the blogs of those whose feeds are distributed through Planet PHP. In thinking through this, I've come up with the following eras I think we, the PHP community, have had over the last ten years. These are in a general order, but eras overlap, and some have lasted longer than others, so there's not a distinct beginning or end to each.

He briefly covers five different areas that PHP has evolved in over the past years: the shift to OOP, web application security, framework use, coding standards/organization and the push for better testing.

With the coming of the testing era, I'm seeing a lot of maturity in our community. The code we write is getting better. We're following standards and best practices. We're implementing a lot of good design principles. [...] I think the decade since PHP 5 was released has brought us to a great place as a community. [...] With each new era, we can't forget what we've learned, though. We must continue teaching and revising these best practices as we learn more.

Slava Vishnyakov has an excellent (and long) post today to his site detailing some of his travels through his years of PHP development and some of the things he's learned along the way:

I was learning on my own, so I studied PHP from resources such as php.net. It's a great resource when you consider abundance of the information, but it's terrible, when you look at the quality of advise. I'll start explaining how things evolved in my head in a hope that people will catch up where they are now to understand some things further. By no means this is a "definitive" guide to PHP. Just a few tricks that might help you save your precious time and nerves.

The post includes a lot of helpful hints covering things like the inevitable evolution of the codebase and the growing pains he worked though, the use of static methods, autoloading, bad variable naming, unit testing and MVC restructuring.

Damien Seguy has official published the PHP statistics for July 2008 to the Nexen.net website today. Here's a summary:

• PHP 5 reaches 40,63% of PHP market share
• PHP 5.2.6 usage is growing fast, about to take over PHP 5.2.5
• PHP 4.4.9 and 5.2.6 will threaten PHP 4.4.8's dominance in August 2008

You can find the evolution stats for this past month here and the full statistics here.

Damien Seguy has submitted the latest PHP usage statistics for the results of April 2008.

Highlights in this month's edition include:

• PHP 5.2.6 is growing up fast, thanks to no PHP 5.3
• PHP 5 reaches 38.93% of PHP market share, up 2%
• They passed the mark of 30 millions domain tested this month

You can get the full stats (including the numbers and some great graphs) from the Nexen.net website - full stats, evolution stats.

In a new post Michael Kimsal does a good job comparing the rise of PHP5 (and what it brought with it) to his language of choice these days - Groovy.

I remember when PHP5 first came out having 'discussions' with a number of people who insisted that PHP5 was way better than 4. [...] Basically, intentions were made clearer with things like "public protected private" (PPP),but I have not yet seen any web project get done faster or dare I say even much *better* due to those sorts of things. [...] This isn't specifically saying PPP is necessarily bad, but that PHP could have addressed the issue in a fashion more suitable to dynamic languages. Keep reading for an example.

His comparison is to how Groovy handles properties in a class - everything is private unless declared otherwise. This could be ported (somewhat) over to PHP and would eliminate the need to search&replace all over the code for the right variables.

Damien Seguy has posted the latest statistics for PHP's usage for the month of March 2008. Here's some of the highlights:

• There were no surprises, only data reinforcing already set trends
• PHP 5 now make up over a third of all PHP installations to date
• More installations moved up to PHP versions 5.2.5 and 4.4.8
• Apache has almost reached 70% of the web server market share

You can check out the full details on this month's stats page including the evolution stats over on Nexen.net.

Damien Seguy has posted the PHP statistics for this month - the results from February 2008 - here's some of the highlights:

• PHP 5 set record of growth : + 2,5%, up to 32%
• PHP 5.2 is the second most popular version, ahead of 4.3.
• PHP 4.4.8's popularity is falling

You can check out the numbers yourself for the month as well as the evolution stats showing how things are progressing. He's also added a new graph this month showing the adoption rate that PHP5 is having in the online world.

In a new blog entry Philip Olson takes a look back at the "brief history" of the PHP logo and how its evolved over the years the language has been around.

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.

Damien Seguy has posted this month's (well, January 2008's) PHP statistics to the Nexen.net website. Highlights from this edition include:

• PHP 5 displays strong growth, almost at 30%
• PHP 5.2 will be more popular than PHP 4.3 before April
• PHP 5.2.5 is already the dominating version of PHP 5
• PHP 4.4.8 not so popular

You can get the full details on this month's statistics from the full list of the statistics and the evolution posted on Nexen.

Damien Seguy has submitted this month's update to the Nexen.net PHP statistics for the month of December 2007:

PHP adoption statistics for December 2007 are released. Here are the monthly highlights:

• PHP 5 is now running on 27.8% of the servers
• PHP 5.2 usage will pass PHP 4.3 by April
• PHP 5.2.5 is 8.7% of the PHP 5 market

You can get more information on this month's stats over on the Nexen.net website - the evolution stats and the full stats for December 2007.