In a new post to his site Hannes Magnusson talks some about the current PHP documentation (and PHP.net site) formatting and how, while changes to it are quick, they should be instant. He suggests a path to get there and a new tool that could help.

Since 2008 there have been numerous efforts to create a new design for www.php.net, all of which have failed - so far. We've never come as close as two years ago, when the "beta mode" option was added to our website, but we never really got around to finish it. The "beta design" has even received a lot of makeover compared to what is "beta mode" now. To make things a little bit more awesome, there is also a new branch called "responsive" which has a lot of changes in it too, especially for manual pages. Hopefully, one day, we'll actually finish one of these and flip the switch forever.

While he's been a fan of the DocBook structure that's currently in use, he points out that learning the markup can be a hinderance to people contributing. His tool, PhD, does some custom parsing too adding additional complexity. To help, he's working on a new tool (WTFM) to use Markdown formatting instead of DocBook, a more common format.