Re: User commentary in docs

On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 06:41, Bill Salak <bill@devtemple.com> wrote: >>Yes, documentation is tricky.  People, especially PHP users, come from so > many different experience backgrounds that it is almost impossible to write > one set of docs that speaks to everyone.  There are things in the user > comments that I have seen people pick up on that I would have thought was > completely obvious and unnecessary to document, but turn out to be extremely > helpful to a few.  I think the bulk of our user comments are never going to > get folded back into the main docs as they tend to repeat the main docs in a > slightly different way, but are valuable in their own right simply because > they explain the same thing from a different perspective. > > I have personally drawn insight from the user comments area many times over > the years for exactly these reasons you point out - it's a different voice > or perspective and sometimes that is what is needed rather than only new > information. The volume and type of messages found in the user comments is > saying something. I think what you're seeing are the users looking for an > official php forum to build community around. > > I think there is a place somewhere in association with the official php > documentation for large collections of user submitted examples and voices.. I don't think we want to maintain such forum. We don't even have the manpower to maintain the current user notes, so expanding upon that will require more people to help out - which we simply do not have. There are also literally thousands of support/codesnippet/.. forums around the web, in various languages and forms. It shouldn't be hard to find such forum if the user wants to find it. The user notes are awesome. I used them extensively when I first started learning PHP, and still today I read notes people have submitted on "underdocumented things". -Hannes