The reason for PhD to exist was that the previously used DSSSL based system was slow: a full build (all formats and all languages) took 24 hours to complete. Further, the tools the system based on were old, rusty and nobody understood why they broke on some machines, but also why they worked on other ones. Having a php-based system for PHP ensures that there is always someone around who can fix it if it's broken. This wasn't the case with the old documentation build system.

The conversion was spurred on by the fact that the PEAR documentation stopped building and more and more people were finding it hard to build on their machines too. He walks through the steps he took - installing PhD, converting over the docs to the DocBook 5 format and the first builds with the new system.

Now that at the XML was shiny, too, it was time to actually use PhD on it. The numbers were amazing: While a build for one format and one language took around 40 minutes on my system (dual core Macbook with 2GHz and 2GiB RAM), building the same with PhD takes 45 seconds!

Feel the difference:
With the old OpenJade/DocBook it took 40-60 minutes to build 'many htmls' version of the manual.
With PhD it takes less than 2 minutes to build all three formats ('phpweb', 'one big html' and 'many htmls').

You can grab the latest version of PhD to work on your very own docs either from their CVS repository or download them from the Docs section on the main PHP.net website.

The PHP documentation team is pleased to announce the initial release of the new build system that generates the PHP Manual. Written in PHP, PhD ([PH]P based [D]ocBook renderer) builds are now available for viewing at docs.php.net. Everyone is encouraged to test and use this system so that bugs will be found and squashed.

Once the new build system is stable, expect additional changes to the PHP manual that will include an improved navigation system and styling for OOP documentation.

You can use the my.php page to set it as your default mirror if you'd like to use it seamlessly.

Quick note; We released PhD0.1RC1 today o/ Building the php.net documentations has never been as easy or as fast. [...] It takes less than 2 minutes (on my two years old Precision M70 laptop) to render the entire php.net documentations in three formats.

He includes instructions on fetching the packages needed/documents to compile, modify the configuration files and installing and rendering the php.net documentation. They've also set up a special mirror of the PHP documentation with experimental builds of the docs.