Rasmus releases PHP tools. It was called "Personal Home Page tools" - the birth of PHP

Rasmus introduces PHP/FI, combining the names of previous releases(PHP). This second-generation implementation began the true evolution of PHP from a suite of tools into a programming language in its own right.

Zeev and Andi rewrote the interpreter and introduced a new extension API which makes it a lot easier for the community to contribute new extensions.The language’s name changed to the recursive acronym “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”. PHP 3.0 was the first version that closely resembles PHP as it exists today.

Tobias Ratschiller releases version 0.9.0 of the phpMyAdmin web administration tool for MySQL. For a long time it remained one of the primary tools for accessing MySQL and MySQL-like databases.

Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans release the Zend Engine.

PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository (originally PHP Extension and Add-on Repository) is PHP’s version of foundation classes, and becomes one of the key ways to distribute PHP extensions among developers. PEAR was born from discussions held at the PHP Developers’ Meeting (PDM).

PHP 4 comes with a brand new Zend Engine, which has since overseen PHP advances. In addition to greatly improved performance, PHP 4 included support for more web servers, HTTP sessions, output buffering, and several new language constructs.

Sebastian Bergmann starts work on the most used PHP testing framework. It was inspired by SUnit and JUnit.

The most popular CMS in the world appears in 2004 and is used by more than one third of all websites on the Internet.

Facebook.com launched as a simple, server-rendered PHP website.

Zend Engine 2, with a new object model and new extensions, such as SimpleXML, SOAP, MySQLi, SQLite.

Symfony project kicks off and Fabien Potencier makes the first import of the Symfony 1 code to the subversion repository.

Zend Framework was one of the first frameworks developed as a set of reusable components. It’s goal was “extreme simplicity” and “use-at-will architecture”. Released in 2005, it helped bring PHP into the enterprise market.

PHP 6 was never released but the book 'Fast and easy web development' is still available on the Internet.

Doctrine 1.0 released

Doctrine 1.0 released

FIG, framework interoperability group, is born. The FIG's recommendations, called PSRs, drastically changed the landscape of the PHP ecosystem.

PHP finally gets proper auto-loading. Before the first PSR standard was accepted, PHP files were an insane mix of includes and requires.

FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for heavily-loaded websites. It is merged into the PHP 5.3 release in 2010.

Doctrine 2.0 released

The first release of the famous HTTP client for PHP

Taylor Otwell created Laravel as an attempt to provide a more advanced alternative to CodeIgniter framework. It will go on to revolutionize the entire PHP landscape.

Symfony 2 released

The first state-of-the-art package management tool for PHP.

Laravel 2 released

Laravel 3 released

Traits, shortened array syntax, and built-in webserver for testing purpose come with significant performance improvements, a reduced memory footprint and over 100 fixed bugs.

PSR-1: basic coding standard; PSR-2: coding style guide.

Zend Framework 2 released

PSR-3 logger interface accepted

The first public release of ReactPHP proves the async model can be bought into PHP application.

Laravel 4 is re-written from the ground up as a collection of components that integrate with each other to make up a framework.

PSR-4 describes a specification for auto-loading classes from file paths. This PSR also describes where to place files that will be autoloaded according to the spec.

PSR-0 deprecated in favor of PSR-4

PSR-7 HTTP message interface accepted and the standard finally settled on how to deal with HTTP requests and responses the OOP way.

Symfony 3 released

PSR-6 caching interface accepted

A major language renewal comes with the new Zend Engine 3. It is twice as fast as the previous PHP 5.6 release.

Zend Framework 3 released

Nullable types, class constant visibility modifiers, void return type, and a performance boost.

Laravel LTS released

Symfony 4 released

PHP 7.2 released. PHP becomes the first programming language with modern cryptography in its standard libs. Thanks to the bundled 'libssodium'.

ReactPHP 1.0 LTS released

PHP 7.3 released

Laravel 6 released

Symfony 5 released

PHP 7.4 released with typed properties, arrow functions, numeric literal separator and OPcache preloading.

Laravel 7 released

Laravel 8 released

PHP 8.0.0 released with new features: union types, JIT, nullsafe operator, named arguments, attributes, match expression, constructor property promotion, new static return type, new mixed type, throw expression, allow ::class on objects, non-capturing catches, trailing comma in parameter lists, create datetime from interface, new Stringable interface, new str_contains function

PHP 8.1 released with new features: Enums, Fibers,

Symfony 6 released

Laravel 9 released

PHP 8.1.10 released