If you've ever tried to read code written by someone other than yourself (who hasn't?), you know it can be a daunting task. [...] PhpDoc, short for PhpDocumentor, is a powerful tool that allows you to easily document your code via specially formatted comments. [...] By using PhpDoc, you can make it easy for others (and yourself) to understand your code - weeks, months, and even years after you've written it.

He introduces the concept of "docblocks" and includes several examples of how to comment things like packages, files, classes and functions/methods. Finally, he wraps up the post with an example of using the "phpdoc" command to run phpDocumentor and build the docs. In the comments, another tool is also suggested - DocBlox, a project that still parses the same docbloc syntax but does it in a much more memory efficient way (and is an actively maintained project).

The interfaces define the standard and are extensively documented. The implementation was built by copying the interfaces and implementing the methods. Now we have the documentation comments duplicated, which is a pain to maintain if we clarify or change anything in the interfaces documentation. [...] In PHP, there is a couple of doc compilers. While they basically all follow the same syntax as Java uses, none of them gets everything right unfortunately.

The four covered are PhpDoctor, DocBlox, PHPDoc and Doxygen. They look at things like namespace support, the inheritance information they generate and if it correctly uses the "@inheritDoc" tagging functionality.

After recent complaints in the PHP-GTK mailing list, auroraeosrose mentioned mgdm has set up a SVN repository for the docs, to ease working on them. This new repository is available at http://svn.thefrozenfire.com/phpgtkdoc/

The trunk currently has repositories for the gtkdocs and the phpdoc application you can check out and use to generate and develop on the documentation locally.

How to achieve PHP code completion in Netbeans for the CodeIgniter, Kohana frameworks? See following articles:

Both articles come from the "My Beloved PHP" site:

• Netbeans: Code Completion for the Kohana Framework
• Netbeans revisited: Code Completion for Code-igniter - Part 1 & Part 2

In the short post she lists just a few of the issues surrounding the use of the function including that it:

• is prone to critical abuse by user-supplied code
• skips opcode cache optimizations
• encourages not using comments (evil)
• 100% blind to reflection or PHPDoc style documentation generation

He notes that this improvement not only makes installing the phpDocumentor package more flexible, but it also makes it a snap to get up and running. Those used to the PEAR package system will be happy to know it's a simple "pear " command away. It makes full use of the package.xml 2.0 features to really make the install nice and clean.