5 ms·

PHP Ninja Manual - PHP 5.4 documentation available in Chrome

25 points by vacipr 14y ago

rohanpai 14y ago
This is so great! Thanks
jbarciauskas 14y ago
One of the most horrific aspects of PHP documentation is that it isn't versioned. In most cases, documenters are good enough to note which versions various parameters and return values correspond to, but it is not logged in a rigorous way and you have to be sure to check that whatever you are reading applies to whatever version you're running. Contrast this to Python, where you go to the docs for whatever version you're running (e.g., http://docs.python.org/release/2.6.7/ http://docs.python.org/release/2.6.7/) and you don't have to think about versions again. In any case, this will probably be useful for those of us on 5.3, the version in the title just made me think and rant.
- RossM 14y ago
  Most pages include a one-liner of changes, however I agree that full-page versioning would be useful.
jontas 14y ago
I installed this with one specific goal: I was really hoping it would give me quick access to the format letters for the date() function, however, it doesn't seem to display that part of the docs. It does, hover, let me open the php.net page directly from the extension, so it might speed up access to that info. This is by far the page I view most on php.net. Is there a way to assign a shortcut to open the extension?
- kwamenum86 14y ago
  You might find the fourth page of the code examples for the date function helpful. Shows several formatting examples.
patmcguire 14y ago
Back when I was doing PHP I loathed the docs for their vagueness and the overbearing wrongness of the comments (no, we're not going to tell you how to make these date handling fucntions work together, we're going to show something that involves subtracting or adding manually and leads to sadness.) That said, I miss that they were SEO'd in the good sense. Most people are looking for the documentation are Googling it and every PHP function has its own page with the title the same as the function so you can generally count on the first result being the actual answer. This is opposed to Rails or Ruby in general, where you always get dumped into a blog post like "Basic Caching" because something in the middle of it kind of fits when you're looking for a very specific issue.
- beezee 14y ago
  funny it makes me wonder how much of "php is easy to get started with" actually translates to "php is correctly indexed by google"

25 points by vacipr 14y ago

This is so great! Thanks

One of the most horrific aspects of PHP documentation is that it isn't versioned. In most cases, documenters are good enough to note which versions various parameters and return values correspond to, but it is not logged in a rigorous way and you have to be sure to check that whatever you are reading applies to whatever version you're running. Contrast this to Python, where you go to the docs for whatever version you're running (e.g., http://docs.python.org/release/2.6.7/ http://docs.python.org/release/2.6.7/) and you don't have to think about versions again. In any case, this will probably be useful for those of us on 5.3, the version in the title just made me think and rant.

RossM 14y ago
Most pages include a one-liner of changes, however I agree that full-page versioning would be useful.

jontas 14y ago

I installed this with one specific goal: I was really hoping it would give me quick access to the format letters for the date() function, however, it doesn't seem to display that part of the docs. It does, hover, let me open the php.net page directly from the extension, so it might speed up access to that info. This is by far the page I view most on php.net. Is there a way to assign a shortcut to open the extension?

kwamenum86 14y ago
You might find the fourth page of the code examples for the date function helpful. Shows several formatting examples.

patmcguire 14y ago

Back when I was doing PHP I loathed the docs for their vagueness and the overbearing wrongness of the comments (no, we're not going to tell you how to make these date handling fucntions work together, we're going to show something that involves subtracting or adding manually and leads to sadness.) That said, I miss that they were SEO'd in the good sense. Most people are looking for the documentation are Googling it and every PHP function has its own page with the title the same as the function so you can generally count on the first result being the actual answer. This is opposed to Rails or Ruby in general, where you always get dumped into a blog post like "Basic Caching" because something in the middle of it kind of fits when you're looking for a very specific issue.

beezee 14y ago
funny it makes me wonder how much of "php is easy to get started with" actually translates to "php is correctly indexed by google"