Sean Coates

Today, I put together a new (small) tool, at the request of Jared Williams, on the doc list. It occurred to me that some of my other doc tools are virtually unknown.

Here's a brief description of three.

Pre-Configured Docs

One of peoples' beefs about PHPDoc and Docbook is the tool chain required to build it. This tool is so simple, I wouldn't even call it a "tool" outside of this post: basically, it's a pre-configured docbook tree of the PHP manual. Why would anyone want this? Well, the requester needed it for a command-line tool he's building, but was having diffulties (guessing here) getting the tool chain working. It was a simple job, so I scripted and cronned it up. Note: you still need the tool chain to, e.g. build the HTML manual.

If you need a pre-configured doc tree (with appropriate functions.xml files, etc.), for some reason, see: http://www.phpdoc.info/docs_prepared/. This will evolve over time: purging old builds, a "latest" build script, etc. It's tarred up, nightly.

(keep reading, the other two are cooler (-: )

Notes manager

I've mentioned this one a couple times, to a few people (and briefly, on the doc list). I'll eventually port it to docweb. The PHP Manual has User Contributed Notes on (almost) every page. These are a headache to maintain. Most of them are garbage. If you have a CVS account, you can help. All you need to do is log in and get the magic cookie (the tool will ask you for this if you haven't yet logged in). I find my notes manager at http://www.phpdoc.info/notes/manage.php helps ease the usually-thankless task of purging notes (the tool itself only proxies notes).

Commits

IMO, this is the coolest of the tools. You may have noticed the RSS feed in the right-bar of my blog, of the "latest PHP commits". I construct this feed myself. See: http://www.phpdoc.info/commits/ for HTMLized versions of the commit mails (I track most, but not all PHP commits). If you're interested in the RSS feed(s), try: http://www.phpdoc.info/commits/rss (or: http://www.phpdoc.info/commits/rss/pear, http://www.phpdoc.info/commits/rss/doc)

Hope those are useful to more people than just me. If you have questions, or find bugs, be sure to let me know.