Delete "General Information" page in FAQ, and improve "Found A Problem?" box
| From: | Rowan Tommins [IMSoP] | Date: | Wed, 17 Sep 2025 20:37:01 +0000 |
| Subject: | Delete "General Information" page in FAQ, and improve "Found A Problem?" box | ||
| Groups: | php.doc | ||
| Request: | Send a blank email to phpdoc+get-969388579@lists.php.net to get a copy of this message | ||
Hi all,
While looking for sources for the history section of the PHP article in Wikipedia, I stumbled on this page: https://www.php.net/manual/en/faq.general.php
Although it has had a handful of cleanup edits, most of the content is out-dated, redundant, or both:
- "What is PHP?" - out of date copy from the Preface of the manual; the homepage has a slightly different version, as does the Introduction page
- "What does PHP stand for?" - this is also explained in both the Preface and the Introduction; the explanation of recursive acronyms and link to Wikipedia page are nice for the curious, maybe they could go in the Introduction (there's also a link to the homepage of FOLDOC, where there's a short definition of "recursive acronym" written two months before PHP 1.0 was released)
- What is the relation between the versions? - dates from when people needed to understand how PHP 3 differed from PHP/FI 2.0; there is an entire section of the manual about PHP's history, and pages about supported and unsupported versions
- Can I run several versions of PHP at the same time? - refers to an "INSTALL" file which no longer exists; there's an entire section of the manual about different ways to install it
- I think I found a bug! Who should I tell? - talks about the "PHP Bug Database", with the link going to the GitHub Issues page because it uses a shared entity &url.php.bugs;
I suggest deleting this entire page.
The bug reporting is the only thing I can't see covered better elsewhere. On the other hand, every page of the manual has a prominent "Report a Bug" link which is actually for reporting a *documentation* bug.
I suggest adding a second line to this section for problems with PHP itself:
Found A Problem?
With this manual: Learn How To Contribute • Submit a Pull Request • Report a Bug
With PHP itself: Learn How To Contribute • Submit a Pull Request • Report a Bug
The existing "Report a Bug" link also goes directly to the "blank issue" page, rather than the reporting templates - it should be e.g.
https://github.com/php/doc-en/issues/new/choose?affected-page=https:%2F%2Fphp.net%2Ffaq.general
instead of
https://github.com/php/doc-en/issues/new?body=From%20manual%20page:%20https:%2F%2Fphp.net%2Ffaq.general%0A%0A---
Thoughts?
--
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]