This is actually a repost from PHP Architect website.
How it started
I am not aware of anyone who doesn’t know that PHP’s mascot is an elePHPant, created by Vincent Pontier back in 1998. Most “serious” PHP Developers have at least one elePHPant in the home somewhere.
Making the Herd Stronger
I’m not sure how much you have been keeping up with what’s coming up in the PHP Tek 2025 conference, but one of the things John and I have been doing since bringing PHP Tek back is giving people an opportunity to either establish their own personal herd or to grow their existing herd. The first year, we offered people attending the conference one of two choices: either a PHP Architect elePHPant, whose name is Archie, or a Laravel elePHPant named “Liona”. Yes, a lot of the elePHPants have a name. Last year, we decided to take it up a notch and created a custom elePHPant for PHP Tek 2024 that we affectionately named “Oscar.” Well, this year, we did the same thing. We created a new elephant for PHP Tek 2025, who I lovingly call Tony, but that is not his official name yet. We do this because we remember how excited we were to get our first elePHPant and wanted other PHP developers to experience that as well. If you’ve been in the PHP community long enough, you probably have already established your own personal herd. So, we wanted to give everyone who attended PHP Tek the opportunity to grow their herd. I’m not sure how long we’re going to continue this tradition. It’s actually quite time-consuming and expensive to come up with a new elePHPant and get it manufactured and shipped to us in the US in time for the conference every year. Take this year’s elePHPant, for example. We started the process back in Sept of 2024, and as of my writing this blog post, they have yet to arrive in the US. Once they do get here, they need to still travel to Chicago.
There are a couple of fun sites out there for those who enjoy the elePHPant lifestyle. The first is A Field Guide to Elephpants, “detailing the attributes, habitats, and variations of the Elephpas hypertextus.” It’s a field guide of the elePHPants that are out in the wild. It has a lot of fun information about the different elephants, like who created it, what it was for, and what was on it, along with pictures. But the field guide could use some updating. It’s hosted in a GitHub repository maintained by Tim Bond and Philip Sharp, but you can add to the field guide by contributing to the repo at https://github.com/philipsharp/afieldguidetoelephpants/ and creating a pull request of updated information.
