So you've seen all of the pictures of the elePHPants floating around and want to get your hands on one of your very own? Good news! Damien Seguy and crew have another fresh batch of huggable blue PHPness on the way and you can place your order now:

If you have missed the boat of the first generation of elePHPants, now is the right time to catchup up and participate to the 2008 generation! As for the first generation, this project is open to every PHP User group and aficionados, that want to adopt elePHPants, small or big.

Pricing is 4 Euros per elephant (in a 50 count box only) or 50 Euro for one of the larger elephants. They're even open to having company logos ("your own brood") added to the other side of his back. You can find more details on getting your hands on one at this page on the Nexen.net website or just head right to the order form to get a little blue PHPer to call your own.

Following up on Philip Olson's post about the evolution of PHP logos, Wolfgang Drews (of DynamicWebPages.de) has posted a few other examples.

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 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.

On Pádraic Brady's blog, he gives an update on his "Patterns for PHP" project he's been working up. He's made the move from DocuWiki to MediaWiki for the structure of the site.

As part of the migration, I grabbed a very lightweight theme and implemented my own changes to spruce it up and patch some small errors the original authors made. With some new colouring the result is a clean design with an open space feel and just a feather brush of colour.

I even got around to creating a simple logo to replace the text heading! This slew of changes makes all the difference to how the website is presented, and avoids the overly crowded "I'm an encylopedia!" feel of Wikipedia. Time to start moving to a proper domain...

The patterns site has also been populated with some info already - details on four patterns: Singleton, Registry, Factory, and Abstract Factory.