This section preserves a small archive of the original phpWebThings project, an open-source PHP CMS framework that ran from roughly 2003 through 2008. The current phpwebthings.org is an editorial site about self-hosted open-source web applications, run by Edwin Rice. I am not the original author of phpWebThings. The pages below are reproduced from the Wayback Machine for historical and continuity purposes.
Why this archive exists
I picked up the phpwebthings.org domain in 2026 specifically because of the project that lived here from 2003 onward. phpWebThings was a small open-source content management framework written in PHP and released under GPL, originally by a developer who used the alias ckleiman, with later contributions from a small group of community maintainers (notably ottojan, george_findlay, tester1, T1, kisertet and the localizer Paulo Assis based on the news posts captured by the Wayback Machine).
It was the kind of project that, in 2003, would feel familiar to anyone who’d touched PHP-Nuke, phpBB, or the early MediaWiki: a “build-a-portal” framework with modules for news, forums, downloads, FAQs, polls, file management and a webmail client, all driven by MySQL, all themable, with a multilingual front-end that supported twenty languages. It picked up an LWN.net mention, lived on SourceForge, and quietly faded out around 2008 the way many small open-source projects of that era did.
It would be a small kind of cultural vandalism to wipe that history off the domain entirely. So this section keeps it. The pages here are short, attributed, and clearly marked as historical.
Pages in this archive
- About the original phpWebThings project — a plain-language summary of what the project was, who worked on it, and what eventually happened to it.
- phpwebthings.org news from February and March 2003 — news posts pulled from the homepage as it looked on April 7, 2003 (Ephemerid module, Dutch language pack, IRC channel announcement, FAQ call-for-tips).
- phpwebthings.org downloads index, June 2003 — the Downloads page as it looked on June 8, 2003: phpWebThings, phpDBform, beta releases, WTAdmin, translation packs, patches.
- phpwebthings.org index page, September 9, 2004 — selected text from the homepage as captured by the Wayback Machine that day (VITY theme changer, PHP 5.0 announcement, Journals 1.2 module).
- phpwebthings.org community news, late 2005 to early 2006 — news posts pulled from the homepage on March 3, 2006 (add_download update, Christmas note from labgab.com, ban-test news, the typoglycemia post).
A note on copyright and attribution
The original phpWebThings code was distributed under the GNU General Public License. The project’s website text and news posts I’m reproducing here belonged to their original authors. I’m including only short excerpts under fair-use, with each excerpt clearly attributed to the Wayback Machine snapshot it was pulled from, the date of capture, and (where it appears in the original) the original author’s name. If you are one of the original authors and you’d prefer something here be removed, email me at edwinrice1977@gmail.com and I’ll take it down.
The original Wayback captures themselves are still available at web.archive.org/web/2004*/phpwebthings.org and I encourage anyone curious to read them in full there.
What this archive is not
- Not a fork of the original codebase. I have no plans to revive phpWebThings as software. Anyone who wants to is welcome to; the source is on the Internet Archive and on a couple of stale SourceForge mirrors.
- Not a continuation of the project’s community. The forums, downloads section, and module ecosystem are not coming back here.
- Not a commercial reuse. There are no affiliate links in this archive section, no ads, no tracking beyond the cookieless analytics described in the privacy policy.
For everything else this site does in 2026 and forward, see the About page.