May 7, 2008

PHP Release History

PHP is a computer language used to create dynamic web pages.

What makes it great? It’s platform independent, easy to use and best of all it’s FREE. It runs under PHP Licence.

What is PHP Licence? The PHP License is the software license under which the PHP programming language is released. The PHP License is a GPL incompatible free software license according to the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative.

The current stable version of PHP is 5.2.6. Here is the release history of PHP:

Major Version Minor Version Release date Notes
1.0 1.0.0 1995-06-08 Officially called “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools)”. This is the first use of the name “PHP”.
2.0 2.0.0 1996-04-16 Considered by its creator as the “fastest and simplest tool” for creating dynamic web pages
3.0 3.0.0 1998-06-06 Development moves from one person to multiple developers. Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrite the base for this version.
4.0 4.0.0 2000-05-22 Added more advanced two-stage parse/execute tag-parsing system called the Zend engine.
4.1.0 2001-12-10 Introduced ’superglobals’ ($_GET, $_POST, $_SESSION, etc.
4.2.0 2002-04-22 Disabled register_globals by default. Data received over the network is not inserted directly into the global namespace anymore, closing possible security holes in applications.
4.3.0 2002-12-27 Introduced the CLI, in addition to the CGI.
4.4.0 2005-07-11 Added man pages for phpize and php-config scripts
4.4.8 2005-07-11 Several security enhancements and bug fixes. End of life release for PHP 4
5.0 5.0.0 2004-07-13 Zend Engine II with a new object model.
5.1.0 2005-11-24 Performance improvements with introduction of compiler variables in re-engineered PHP Engine.
5.2.0 2006-11-02 Enabled the filter extension by default.
5.2.6 2008-05-01 Several security enhancements and bug fixes
5.3.0 No date set
6.0 6.0.0 No date set


Colour Meaning
Red Old release; not supported
Yellow Old release; still supported
Green Current release
Blue Future release

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