PHP has some of the best centralised documentation of any programming language. Several years ago they introduced user-contributed comments, which allowed developers a quick way to plug any holes they found. Unfortunately, with the new features introduced in 5.2 / 5.3, as well as more general advances in practices, a lot of these comments are now very dated. Some of them were downright wrong when they were posted.

Now though, PHP.net has made it’s documentation fully editable by members of the public through a web-based DocBook editor at https://edit.php.net. We’re hoping that this will lead to even greater quality of documentation and remove the need for some of the older comments (despite the occasional glaring inaccuracy, most “wiki” benefit hugely from peer review).

The PHP manual has also been released in some additional formats – an extended CHM file with all the user-contributed comments, and a text-based package accessed from the command-line in the same way as Unix man pages (in fact the command is simply “pman”). We’ve wasted no time in adding commands to our various editors to take advantage of this (previously we’d launch a browser window with a keyword search).

Finally, there’s an slightly odd footnote about a future release of the manual in JSON format. We’re not sure what their plan behind this was, but having the manual in an easy-to-use structured format can be no bad thing.

See the news on PHP.net here.