Rasmus Lerdorf published his Personal Home Page Tools on the 8th june 1995 on the usenet group comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi. Rasmus had worked a full year on the project before releasing it. The tools were meant to replace the perl scripts he used to maintain his website. After a short while he implemented a way to communicate with databases.

There were a few PHP versions that really stand out in the long line of releases.

With PHP 4, the entire core was rewritten to publish it as the Zend Engine. The Zend Engine is a compiler and runtime-engine, which really got the PHP project going. PHP 5 emerged in 2004 and is known for its support for OOP (Object Oriented) programming and of course the PHP Data Object extensions. PHP 5.3 was the last in line of the Great PHP Versions, with features such as closures, late static binding en namespaces.