SOLVED: A Brief History of PHP Versions

What is PHP & Why Is It Important To WordPress

PHP is a server-side scripting language, and it’s crucial to WordPress because WordPress is primarily built using PHP. This means that the core functionality of WordPress, as well as many of its themes and plugins, are written in PHP. When someone accesses a WordPress website, the PHP code is processed on the server to generate the HTML content that the user sees in their browser.

Note that PHP originally stood for “Personal Home Page,” but it now stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”.

PHP development is primarily driven by a community of open-source developers, with contributions from individuals and companies around the world. It is free and open-source software.

PHP Version History

PHP 1.0

• Release Date: June 8, 1995
• End of Life: N/A
• Performance:
  • Basic functionality for web development
• Improvements:
  • Initial release with simple features for handling forms and database connections

PHP 2.0

• Release Date: November 1, 1997
• End of Life: N/A
• Performance:
  • Improved performance and functionality
• Improvements:
  • Introduction of built-in support for various databases
  • Enhanced form handling capabilities

PHP 3.0

• Release Date: June 6, 1998
• End of Life: N/A
• Performance:
  • Significant performance improvements
• Improvements:
  • Introduction of a more powerful and flexible scripting engine
  • Support for object-oriented programming

PHP 4.0

• Release Date: May 22, 2000
• End of Life: August 11, 2008
• Performance:
  • Major performance enhancements
• Improvements:
  • Introduction of the Zend Engine
  • Improved session handling and output buffering

PHP 5.0

• Release Date: July 13, 2004
• End of Life: January 10, 2011
• Performance:
  • Enhanced performance with the new Zend Engine II
• Improvements:
  • Improved support for object-oriented programming
  • Introduction of PHP Data Objects (PDO) for database access

PHP 5.1

• Release Date: November 24, 2005
• End of Life: August 24, 2006
• Performance:
  • Performance improvements and bug fixes
• Improvements:
  • Introduction of the new date and time handling functionality
  • Improved error handling

PHP 5.2

• Release Date: November 2, 2006
• End of Life: January 6, 2011
• Performance:
  • Continued performance enhancements
• Improvements:
  • Introduction of JSON support
  • Improved memory management

PHP 5.3

• Release Date: June 30, 2009
• End of Life: August 14, 2014
• Performance:
  • Significant performance improvements
• Improvements:
  • Introduction of namespaces
  • Late static bindings and closures

PHP 5.4

• Release Date: March 1, 2012
• End of Life: September 3, 2015
• Performance:
  • Improved performance and reduced memory usage
• Improvements:
  • Short array syntax
  • Traits for code reuse

PHP 5.5

• Release Date: June 20, 2013
• End of Life: July 21, 2016
• Performance:
  • Continued performance enhancements
• Improvements:
  • Generators for iteration
  • Password hashing API

PHP 5.6

• Release Date: August 28, 2014
• End of Life: December 31, 2018
• Performance:
  • Modest performance improvements compared to PHP 5.5, with optimizations in memory usage and execution speed
• Improvements:
  • Constant scalar expressions
  • Variadic functions and argument unpacking
  • Improved SSL/TLS support

PHP 6.0

• PHP version 6 was only released in betas due to various issues and challenges encountered during its development. The project was eventually abandoned, and the development focus shifted to PHP 7

PHP 7.0

• Release Date: December 3, 2015
• End of Life: January 10, 2019
• Performance:
  • Major performance leap with Zend Engine 3, resulting in significantly faster execution and reduced memory consumption compared to PHP 5.6
• Improvements:
  • Significant performance improvements (Zend Engine 3)
  • Scalar type declarations and return type declarations
  • Null coalescing operator (??)

PHP 7.4

• Release Date: November 28, 2019
• End of Life: November 28, 2022
• Performance:
  • Continued performance enhancements, particularly with the introduction of preloading, which optimizes opcode caching
• Improvements:
  • Typed Properties
  • Null coalescing assignment operator (??=)
  • Preloading

PHP 8.0

• Release Date: November 26, 2020
• End of Life: November 26, 2023
• Performance:
  • Introduced JIT compilation, further boosting performance for many applications, especially long-running ones
• Improvements:
  • Union types
  • Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation
  • Constructor property promotion

PHP 8.1

• Release Date: November 25, 2021
• End of Life: December 31, 2025
• Performance:
  • Performance improvements, especially in specific use cases, with optimizations in memory management and JIT compilation
• Improvements:
  • Enums
  • Fibers for concurrency
  • Readonly properties

PHP 8.2

• Release Date: December 8, 2022
• End of Life: December 31, 2026
• Performance:
  • Further refinements to JIT and other engine optimizations, contributing to overall performance gains
• Improvements
  • Readonly classes
  • Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) types
  • New Random Extension

PHP 8.3

• Release Date: November 23, 2023
• End of Life: December 31, 2027
• Performance:
  • Minor performance improvements and optimizations
• Improvements:
  • Typed class constants
  • Granular DateTime Exceptions
  • Support for dynamic fetching of enum members

PHP 8.4

• Release Date: November 21, 2024
• End of Life: December 31, 2028
• Performance:
  • Performance improvements through various optimizations
• Improvements:
  • Property Hooks
  • Asymmetric Visibility
  • New array functions (e.g., array_find(), array_any(), array_all())

PHP 8.5

• Release Date: (Expected) November, 2025
• End of Life: (Expected) December, 2029
• Performance:
  • Further performance enhancements are expected, as is typical with new PHP releases
• Details:
  • Unknown but PHP 8.5 is the active development branch for the next release of PHP

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