Part of the /legacy/ archive. This page is a plain-language summary, written by me (Edwin Rice) in 2026, of the original phpWebThings project that lived on this domain from roughly 2003 through 2008. Source material: Wayback Machine captures of phpwebthings.org, the project’s old SourceForge entry, and a 2003 LWN.net brief.
What it was
phpWebThings (the lowercase styling is the original author’s) was a PHP-based content management framework released under GPL. The project’s own description, lifted verbatim from the September 2004 Wayback capture, called it “a Powerful, professional application framework for intermediate to advanced PHP programmer, open source Web Portal, Online Community System, Content Management System (CMS) or whatever you want to call it.” The capitalization is the original author’s; so is the slightly enthusiastic tone, which was the standard register for open-source project pages in that era.
If you used PHP-Nuke, phpBB, or one of the early Mambo (later Joomla) installs in 2003 or 2004, the project will feel familiar. It packaged the standard “portal site” needs of that era into a single installable framework: a news engine, a discussion forum, a downloads section, a FAQ system, polls with comments, a file manager, a download manager, internal search, themes, and a multilingual front-end that supported twenty languages out of the box (Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese and Dutch were each maintained by named community contributors, per the homepage at the time).
It also bundled what the project called phpDBform Creator, a tool for generating web-form-driven database forms from a MySQL schema. That sub-project effectively became part of the phpWebThings package by 2004.
Stack and requirements
The project’s own page listed the stack of the time: PHP 4.x with the MySQL extension, MySQL 3.x or 4.x, and any web server that would talk to PHP. The codebase was, in the project’s words, “written 100% in PHP”. For 2003 that combination was the dominant deployment target on shared hosting, which is exactly where many phpWebThings installs ran.
Who worked on it
Based on the news posts on the homepage from 2003 to 2005, the most active contributors were the user ckleiman (the original author), ottojan (responsible for the Dutch localization and a number of theme and module patches), george_findlay, and tester1 (who shipped the Webmail and Journals modules among others). Localization maintainers were credited by name on the homepage:
- Arabic Support — Mohamed Hesham
- Portuguese Support — Paulo Assis
- Russian Support — Dr. Victor Mosco
- Japanese Support — Yasushi Yonehara
- Dutch Support — Ottojan Visser
This is an incomplete list. The project had a community of contributors I never met, who shipped modules, themes and patches; I’m not in a position to name them all and I would rather list nobody than list some of them and leave others off. If you contributed and would like to be credited here, write me.
Modules and patches I can find evidence of
The Wayback captures from 2004 mention, among others:
- A Webmail module (version 1.2 released 2004-05-26 by tester1) with attachment support, address book, signatures and per-folder quotas.
- A Journals module (1.2, same release wave) with mood and music fields, comment cleanup and avatar support.
- Theme work coordinated by ottojan, including a “VITY” theme family used by an early site that ran on the framework.
- A series of 1.4 patches in March and April 2004: a Security Patch, a Theme Patch, a Forum Patch, and a Mail Function Patch.
What happened to it
Like many GPL portal frameworks of its era, phpWebThings slowed down as the larger ecosystem moved to Drupal, Joomla, and (a little later) WordPress for content sites. Wayback shows steadily fewer captures from 2008 onward, and meaningful project activity appears to have stopped by then. The domain itself stayed registered and was renewed for many years afterward by various owners; the project’s source code persists on a small number of stale SourceForge mirrors and inside the Wayback Machine.
I picked up the domain in 2026 with no claim on the project’s name beyond hosting this archive. The 2026 site is editorial: it reviews self-hosted open-source web applications. See About for the longer version.
Source links
- Wayback Machine index for this domain: web.archive.org/web/2004*/phpwebthings.org
- Specific 2004-09-09 capture used as the main source for this page: web.archive.org/web/20040909232224/…
- SourceForge project page (mostly stale, partial): see the project listing for “phpwebthings” there.