About this museum
For most of the 2000s, a handful of PHP packages ran a huge part of the web. A gaming clan had a phpBB board. A local Linux user group had a Mambo site. Somebody's uncle had a WordPress blog with the blue Kubrick header he never changed. Most of those sites are gone, and the few Wayback Machine snapshots that survive rarely show what it was like to click around them.
So I’m rebuilding them.
How the exhibits are made
Each exhibit runs on the original software. I install a release from the right year in an old PHP 5 environment, keep the default theme, fill it with made-up users, threads, news and products, and save the pages it produces as static HTML. The server clock is set to the exhibit's archive date, so "Today", "2 hours ago" and post dates come from the software itself.
vBulletin and Invision Power Board were commercial, closed-source products, so I can't run them. Those two exhibits use real forum pages from 2006–2007 saved by the Wayback Machine, with the original posts swapped for invented ones.
Links inside an exhibit lead to other saved pages. Logging in, searching, posting and checking out do nothing: there is no server behind them anymore.
What gets in
I pick software that was everywhere and that anyone who was online back then will recognise at a glance. The list says nothing about which package was best.
Dates
Every exhibit has an archive date, and everything on it fits that date: join dates, version numbers, the games people argue about, the hardware in their signatures. A forum from October 2006 talks about the upcoming Wii launch and the Windows Vista beta, and never anything newer.
Who made this
Made and supported by Yury Molodtsov | molodtsov.me
The source, including the scripts that rebuild every exhibit from the original software, is on GitHub: github.com/ymolodtsov/php-web-museum.
If something looks wrong for its era, that's a bug, and I'd like to hear about it.