If you've wanted to contribute something back to PHP but aren't familiar with C (or don't feel comfortable enough with it) Sammy Powers offers another solution. In his latest post he shows you how to contribute to the PHP documentation and update the manual for new features, missing information or fixes to current code examples.

If you've been wanting to contribute to PHP internals, starting with the documentation can be a great entry point; especially because it doesn't require dusting off those old C books from college. But knowing where to start can be tricky since information on how to contribute to the docs is scattered across the internet. This article is a step-by-step guide of how to contribute documentation to the PHP manual.

He starts with the "quick and dirty" way of editing the manual through the edit.php.net site, but points out that it's really only useful for smaller changes, not large documentation updates. The rest of the post shows you how to set up the documentation locally and generate the results to validate your changes. He talks some about the DocBook format they're written in, the build process with the PhD (PHP docs generator) and running the php.net test suite against the changes. This ensures that nothing else has broken on the site in the process.

He shows you where to make your changes, how to generate it from either a skeleton or using the docgen script and submitting the changes back to the repository. There's also a few other random changes to make before committing the files back via SVN and pushing them back upstream. He ends the post talking about the GoPHP7-ext project and how to find extensions that are missing documentation or where it's incomplete (easy thanks to an included "check-missing-docs" file included in the repository).

The PHP.net website has introduced a new feature to help make it a bit clearer which versions of PHP are supported and which have reached their end-of-life mark. This new Supported versions page off the main site provides listings of currently supported versions and graphical timelines of past (and future) support milestones.

Each release branch of PHP is fully supported for two years from its initial stable release. During this period, bugs and security issues that have been reported are fixed and are released in regular point releases. After this two year period of active support, each branch is then supported for an additional year for critical security issues only. Releases during this period are made on an as-needed basis: there may be multiple point releases, or none, depending on the number of reports.

The page includes information on when the initial release in a series was made (like the 5.4.x or 5.5.x series), when active support did/will end and how long the timeline is for security fixes and support. As of the time of this post, PHP 5.3.x is the only series that has reached end-of-life, but the 5.4.x series is coming close being in security fix only mode now and EOL-ing completely in ten months.

As many probably noticed yesterday, the entire PHP.net domain (subdomains and all) were marked by the Google Safe Browsing service as potentially harmful. The issue has been discovered and resolved so things are back to normal, but the development group wanted to provide an update as to the current status.

We are continuing to work through the repercussions of the php.net malware issue described in a news post earlier today. As part of this, the php.net systems team have audited every server operated by php.net, and have found that two servers were compromised: the server which hosted the www.php.net, static.php.net and git.php.net domains, and was previously suspected based on the JavaScript malware, and the server hosting bugs.php.net. The method by which these servers were compromised is unknown at this time.

The post talks about some of the actions taken since the compromise and more details about what happened. It all revolved around a malicious Javascript file that was served to some visitors of the site. For more information as it becomes available, check back with the main PHP.net site or follow official_php on Twitter.

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.

In this discussion on Reddit, there's talk about the user comments feature on the PHP.net site and the value they provide to the language and community.

The question, however, has always been "how useful is this feature really and does it bring more harm than good?". It's not that easy to answer since there are so many notes submitted by a wide range of users and some will likely go unnoticed while others seem to get undue attention due to their positioning near the top of the user-notes section of a particularly trafficked page.

The poster proposes a few things that could help make them a bit more effective (and useful overall) including voting on the note contents, flagging potential issues and sorting the notes based on popularity/age. He's put together a proof of concept as seen here with some of the new features.

In this recent post on Reddit.com, there's some good discussion/feedback about the proposed redesign of PHP.net.

Opinions from commentors range widly:

• "The layout's nice. But those colors are downright disgusting."
• "To be honest, the new version is 100x better."
• "It's definitely way better than the old design but still not exactly great is it?.."
• "Much more profressional. Welcome to the 21st century PHP.net."

Have an opinion on the new layout? voice it here!

The main PHP.net site has the release announcement for the two latest versions of the language - PHP 5.3.3 and PHP 5.2.14.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.3. This release focuses on improving the stability and security of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 100 bug fixes, some of which are security related. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release. [...] The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.14. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, some of which are security related.

The announcements list some of the major security enhancements and fixes in both new versions as well as a few new features like updates to the PCRE libraries and more.

Note: this PHP 5.2.14 release marks the end of active support for the PHP 5.2.x branch. It is encouraged that you upgrade to PHP 5.3 by following the steps in this migration guide.

Jaisen Mathai has a helpful hint for those that do any offline work with PHP on their own development systems - how to mirror the PHP manual on a local web server.

In addition to [a local copy of your source] being faster to develop, it lets you work without needing to be connected to the Internet. But what about the tools you use while developing? If you’re a PHP developer then the manual at php.net is an invaluable tool. It only make sense to have it available for when you’re not online.

His example follows the official mirroring part of the PHP.net website and uses a slightly modified rsync command to fetch the manual information from the php.net site and drops it in a location locally. He throws in an Apache configuration too for a simple VirtualHost to get it up and running.

Ben Ramsey has a new blog post that mentions a move for the PHP User Group mailing list - putting it official on the php.net services.

You may recall PHP Groups being created over a year ago for the purpose of networking together the leaders and organizers of PHP user groups around the world. I've been very bad about keeping things moving on this front, but I want to pick things back up and get us talking again.

If you'd like to subscribe to the list, send an email to ug-admins-subscribe [at] lists.php.net. If you don't want to subscribe but still want to keep track of what's happening, point your news reader to news://news.php.net/ug.admins.

The PHP group has made a two quick updates to the recent release of PHP 5.2.6 for the Windows users out there:

The Windows installers and archives were missing the XSL and IMAP extensions.

These updated packages can be downloaded from the Downloads page on PHP.net as usual (with each updated package having a note indicating the change).