History

The beginning

phpLDAPadmin (PLA) started out as DaveDAP, created by Dave Smith in 2002. In August 2003, he renamed DaveDAP to phpLDAPadmin, and released it as v0.9.0 where Dave continued to maintain it and made releases up to v0.9.6 in April 2005. In April, he handed the project over to Deon George.

While Dave was the primary developer, he was also supported by Xavier Renard who helped with the Import/Export and Samba capability, and Uwe Ebel who helped with translation. There were also many other contributors who helped shaped PLA to v0.9.6 as seen in the CREDITS file for those respective releases.

PLA v0.9.6 was built using PHP v4.

The next iteration

Deon took over in September 2005, and PLA is still maintained by him today. Deon’s primary motivation for building and extending PLA was inspired by his work. He needed an easier way to manage entries for a large number of employees and organisations, as well as wanted to be able to allow users and managers to do the same.

To make working with LDAP and PLA easier, Deon introduced the template engine which first started appearing in v0.9.7, which was Deon’s first release. The template engine was fully implemented for v1.0.0, released in February 2006. PLA was also updated to work with PHP v5 when v1.0.0 was released.

With the help of Xavier Bruyet, the template engine was overhauled to take advantage of PHP’s object orientated programming, which was released as v1.1.0 in Dec 2007.

Deon continued the work of decommissioning all the legacy v0.9.x code, and updating all the code to use PHP object orientated implementation, and that was completed as of v1.2.0, released in July 2009.

Also in 2009, Deon moved PLA from Sourceforge, its home since inception, to Github, also changing the code management tool from CVS to GIT. Many users have continued to provide updates to PLA over the years, and GIT has now captured their contributions. This project would not have been as successful as it is without the community identifying and providing fixes to the minor bugs that have surfaced.

PLA v1.2.x officially is supported on PHP v7 and has had limited testing on PHP v8.

With a new family, job commitments and new hobbies, PLA continued to perform its role with little changes in the 1.2.x version stream. With the enhancements in web interfaces, web coding, javascript, PLA was redesigned many times to take advantage of these new approaches, but code was never released as Deon wasn’t able to commit the time to completing the enhancements and supporting it.

Here we are.

In 2019, Deon started working on what is now PLA v2.0 - a complete re-write. Still constrained with personal commitments, that work has continued more slowly than he would have liked.

PLA v2.x is being worked on, now re-engineered to leverage other fantastic open source projects, that have significantly enhanced how it works internally (making it much easier to support), as well as making it easier to modernise with current web experiences.

PLA v2.x will include a docker deployment option, making deployment even easier - so all you’ll need to have as a pre-requisite is a docker environment. That container is available as a preview - currently being built using PHP v8.1 with the aim that it be updated as newer PHP environments are released.

All the work for PLA v2 has made it to the master branch, and much of the effort is being used to make PLA minimally functional (add, edit, delete, list entries) before enabling more advanced features. The old PLA v1.2.x will ultimately be removed from master once it is no longer needed or referenced.

Work still continues, so look out for a version v2.x release, in the mean time, you can take a sneak peak at https://demo.phpldapadmin.org.