The Personal Home Page (PHP) development began in the year of 1995 when Rasmus Lerdorf wrote several Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs in C, which Rasmus Lerdorf used to maintain his personal homepage. Rasmus Lerdorf extended them to work with the web forms and to communicate with the databases and called this implementation as a “Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter” or PHP/FI.
PHP/FI
Lerdorf initially announced the release of PHP/FI as “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0” on the Usenet discussion group comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi on June 8, 1995.
PHP/FI 2
The second version of PHP/FI was released in November 1997. The PHP/FI version 2.0 is a complete rewrite of two packages combined into a single program.
PHP/FI 3
Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language’s name to the recursive acronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. The public testing of PHP 3 began, and the official launch came in June 1998.
PHP/FI 4
On May 22, 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released. As of August 2008, this branch reached version 4.4.9. PHP 4 is no longer under development nor will any security updates be released.
PHP/FI 5
On July 13, 2004, PHP 5 was released, powered by the new Zend Engine II. PHP 5 included new features such as improved support for object-oriented programming, the PHP Data Objects (PDO) extension, and numerous performance enhancements.
PHP/FI 7
During 2014 and 2015, a new major PHP version was developed, which was numbered PHP 7.