General

PHP 8.5 Release Page Design Contest

It's no secret that the PHP website looks dated. Many people cite this as the reason that some people still think PHP is dead. If you've got a website that looks like it hasn't been updated for a decade, who can really blame them.

PHP is very much not dead!

The PHP Foundation recently launched a design contest, where people can submit their designs for what the PHP 8.5 release page looks like. Whilst it'll look (hopefully) more modern than the rest of the site, I do hope the foundation takes some inspiration from the winner and offers them a contract to redo the entire website.

There's already been some great suggestions. My absolute favourite is from Nuno Guerra and based on the number of reactions, I think the winner has already been decided:

I love how clean it looks and how it nicely ties into the foundation website with the subtle use of purple. It also looks great on dark mode too! There are a few others I like too:

There's definitely some submissions that I think look more outdated than the current page design. There's also some that although they look cool, they go too far out of PHP's branding, I don't think they'd get much of a positive reception:

Good luck to all entrants! Hopefully the winner will be announced soon!

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