PHP Contributing to the PHP Manual Tips for contributing to the manual
Example
The following is a list of tips for those who are looking to contribute to the PHP manual:
- Follow the manual's style guidelines. Ensure that the manual's style guidelines are always being followed for consistency's sake.
- Perform spelling and grammar checks. Ensure proper spelling and grammar is being used - otherwise the information presented may be more difficult to assimilate, and the content will look less professional.
- Be terse in explanations. Avoid rambling to clearly and concisely present the information to developers who are looking to quickly reference it.
- Separate code from its output. This gives cleaner and less convoluted code examples for developers to digest.
- Check the page section order. Ensure that all sections of the manual page being edited are in the correct order. Uniformity in the manual makes it easier to quickly read and lookup information.
- Remove PHP 4-related content. Specific mentions to PHP 4 are no longer relevant given how old it is now. Mentions of it should be removed from the manual to prevent convoluting it with unnecessary information.
- Properly version files. When creating new files in the documentation, ensure that the revision ID of the file is set to nothing, like so:
<!-- $Revision$ -->. - Merge useful comments into the manual. Some comments contribute useful information that the manual could benefit from having. These should be merged into the main page's content.
- Don't break the documentation build. Always ensure that the PHP manual builds properly before committing the changes.
