All this is in respect to those who won't get listed on the frontpage.
With this solution we can even list guys who 'only' contribute to
extension level documentation, and keep major contributors on top of the
list.
Not sure what 'only' implies here. Extension documentation (and the
function reference in general) is considered by many to be the most critical
section of the PHP manual.
Well, 'only' means hare: those who add documentation for functions, but dont work as a real member of the group daily by maintaining the docs or fixing bugs related to the function documentation they added.
I am also +1 for the method suggeted by Alexander Aulbach, then Philip
and then Jouni, to list 'historical' contributors separately, and give
current contributors a better recognition. I hope the current
authors/editors will let this go ;)
An easily maintainable and expirable way to implement this might be to
create separate pages for contributions by version. credits.php3,
credits.php4, credits.php5, etc... Maybe not....
Well, this is something not doable again I think. We already have PHP 5 documentation as far as I have seen, and we still modify parts regarding PHP 3. The docs won't be freezed for PHP 4, I am sure we will fill in holes, and fix parts related to PHP 4 after PHP 5 is released. This is due to the nature of the docs, that it is not tied to any PHP version.
Goba