[I need to provide references to more of the articles I've written.]
As of 2012, most of my PHP work is in a Joomla! or Drupal context.
"PHP is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language", according to the information-packed Personal Hypertext Preprocessor (also Personal Home Page) home page. It's often used successfully by site developers who do no other programming. It's swift at run-time. It's notably straightforward to write extensions for it (including such off-beat protocols as WebDAV, SNMP and LDAP), to the extent that it supports (in a sense that can be made precise) more database management systems than any other language I know.
I introduced the LinuxWorld Online audience to the language in January 2001 in "When should you use PHP?"
Zend released a useful summary of events at the January 2000 first PHP Developers' Conference. LinuxPR did an abbreviated summary.
Rasmus and Stig presented PHP at least three times at WWW8, including a well-received hour of the Web Scripting Forum. I wrote up some of this for our June 1999 "Regular Expressions" column. I followed up through the years with:
I like the press release for PHP4. It puts PHP's best foot forward.
We describe for SunWorld Online a bit of what happened at the first PHP Developers' Meeting.
[Give references for COMability, Java (Sam Ruby) scripting, MySQL stored procedures, command-line, ...]
[Explain Zend.]
[Link to history page.]