PHP Logos

Welcome to the [almost complete] history of PHP logos. There have been a few changes over the years, so let’s explore them now:

How this was created

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. Since this file (or logos) do not exist in PHP 3 sources, I scoured the web to find those. Well, the PHP CVS repository attic at least.

The PHP logo

Not a lot has changed here because PHP is still PHP, and the logo clearly shows this. From PHP versions 4.0.0 through 4.4.6 the size is 2962 bytes. However, PHP 5 altered the logo a few times. It went from 4644 bytes in versions 5.0.0 through 5.1.2 down to 2524 bytes from PHP 5.1.3 to today. So, these are officially the PHP logos from 22 May 2000 onward because as they say… the source never lies!

The other PHP logo

Good ‘ol Thies and his pencils or breadsticks or magic PHP wands or… do you remember this? If you do you’re old, like me. This logo was around from PHP 4.0.0 through 4.2.3. Then along came Stigs dog Nadia (4.3.0-4.3.10), Zeev’s dog Scotch (4.3.11-4.4.6), Sterlings rabbit Carmella (5.0.0-5.0.3), then Scotch reappeared (5.0.4 – 5.1.2), and now we see a trippy PHP logo. Oh what a long strange trip it’s been, right? Yes it has! You may see this logo at the end of March, or beginning of April, or intentionally using a secret function.

Older logos, before PHP 4

Several other logos exist too, namely from PHP 3. Although these aren’t from the PHP sources, they exist and most were restored from the PHP CVS repository attic. PHP almost had a Web 2.0 look way back in 1997… almost. Others were found too, but not all are shown here. I could not locate PHP 1 or PHP 2 logos.

Credits

Colin Viebrock created most of these PHP centric logos way back when. Colin is old school PHP at its finest. And Derick remembered Sterlings rabbits name Carmella.

The future

What’s next… an elephant? When will php.net receive its next facelift? How many bytes will the next logo be? PHP is Open Source, so everyone in the world is capable of answering these questions.