The Complete History of PHP: From Personal Scripts to PHP 8.4

The history of PHP is a fascinating journey of evolution, community effort, and quiet dominance in the web development world. What began in 1994 as a simple tool for tracking visits to a personal homepage eventually grew into a global force that now powers over 75% of all websites.

Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, originally wrote a few Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs in C to monitor traffic to his online resume. These tools were called “Personal Home Page Tools,” and from these humble beginnings, the history of PHP officially began. Lerdorf kept improving the tools and eventually released them to the public in 1995 under the name PHP/FI (Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter).

This early version of PHP supported basic form handling and could connect to databases like MySQL—making it a practical choice for creating dynamic web pages at a time when static HTML dominated the internet. Developers quickly adopted it, and PHP began to spread organically.

A major turning point in the history of PHP came in 1997 when Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the PHP parser. Their work laid the foundation for PHP 3, released in 1998, and introduced the new Zend Engine—the core of what makes PHP run. This version also marked a shift in identity: PHP was redefined as a recursive acronym, “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor,” signaling a broader vision beyond personal tools.

History of PHP

PHP 4, released in 2000 and powered by Zend Engine 1.0, brought better performance and session handling. It introduced features like output buffering, improved HTTP headers, and more stable processing of user input. This made it a preferred choice for building content management systems and e-commerce platforms. The history of PHP during this phase was tightly tied to the explosion of internet use in the early 2000s.

But perhaps the most critical chapter in the history of PHP came with PHP 5 in 2004. This version brought robust support for object-oriented programming (OOP), exceptions, and the PHP Data Objects (PDO) extension for database access. The introduction of SimpleXML and DOM also made it easier to work with XML—a key requirement at the time. PHP 5 was stable and full-featured, and it remained the industry standard for over a decade.

However, all was not smooth sailing. PHP began accumulating “technical debt”—inconsistent function naming, weak typing, and legacy behaviors that slowed innovation. The failed PHP 6 project in the late 2000s—intended to bring full Unicode support—became a cautionary tale in the history of PHP. Though it never saw an official release, its shadow loomed large, especially as developers clamored for a modernized language.

The answer finally arrived with PHP 7 in December 2015. The new Zend Engine 3.0 brought a dramatic boost in performance—often twice as fast as PHP 5—and a cleaner, more maintainable codebase. This release was a redemption moment in the history of PHP, bringing features like scalar and return type declarations, null coalescing operators (??), and anonymous classes. For the first time, PHP could truly compete with other modern backend languages like Python and Node.js in both performance and readability.

PHP 7.1 to 7.4 refined this vision further. These versions introduced type safety features, void return types, arrow functions, and typed properties. By 2019, PHP 7.4 had become the most widely used version, thanks to its performance and compatibility improvements. This period in the history of PHP was marked by rapid adoption of frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, and CodeIgniter, which made building scalable applications much easier.

Then came PHP 8.0 in late 2020—a true modernizer. With Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation, PHP could now perform even better for CPU-heavy tasks. This version also introduced union types, attributes (metadata annotations), named arguments, and match expressions. It was a giant leap forward in usability, readability, and performance.

In the words of Zeev Suraski:

With PHP 8, we didn’t just make the language faster—we gave developers the power to write smarter, safer, and more maintainable code.

PHP 8.1, released in 2021, added even more developer-friendly features, including enums, readonly properties, intersection types, and fibers—a low-level tool to support asynchronous programming. PHP 8.2 continued the push for type safety and immutability by introducing readonly classes and disallowing dynamic properties by default.

The latest chapters in the history of PHP include PHP 8.3 and the upcoming PHP 8.4. Released in November 2023, PHP 8.3 brought in dynamic class constant fetch, typed class constants, and the long-requested json_validate() function. These enhancements made it easier to write secure, maintainable code—an ongoing theme in recent PHP releases.

Looking forward, PHP 8.4 (expected in late 2024) is shaping up to be another important step. Proposed features and deprecations point to an even tighter, more consistent language. Improvements in callable types, performance tweaks, and the gradual removal of outdated legacy behavior all show that PHP is not just surviving—it’s thriving.

It’s remarkable that a scripting language created by accident has become a foundational technology for the web. As Rasmus Lerdorf once joked in a talk:

I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language. I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.

That accidental innovation created a language that, despite all criticism, continues to evolve and dominate.

The history of PHP is not just about versions and engines—it’s a story of adaptation. It’s a story of developers pushing the boundaries of what a scripting language can do. It’s the story of WordPress, Facebook’s early years, countless blogs, online stores, learning management systems, and enterprise apps. It’s the quiet powerhouse behind much of the web.

Whether you’re a beginner writing your first script or a senior architect deploying high-scale apps in Docker containers, you’re part of a legacy. And the history of PHP is far from over.

References:

  1. Lerdorf, Rasmus. “PHP on the Road: Past, Present, and Future.” Talk at PHP Conference, 2014.

  2. Suraski, Zeev. “The Silent Revolution of PHP 7.” Zend Blog, 2016.

  3. PHP Official RFC Archive: https://wiki.php.net/rfc

  4. JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Survey, 2021.

  5. PHP Language Statistics: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php

WordPress is the most widely used content management system (CMS) built with PHP. As of May 2025, it powers approximately 43.5% of all websites globally, making it the leading platform for website creation and management.

If you’re interested in learning more about WordPress and how to install it on a local or live server, click here.