It was decided at the PHP Documentation Meeting at LinuxTag to go with livedocs as the solution for almost all of the PHP documentation problems.

This is great news for all involved - thanks to Derick Rethans and Ilia Alshanetsky for their contributions!

Having been frustrated by the length of time that it takes to build the substantial PHP manual from its XML sources (45 minutes or so), I hacked together a nice simple but effective tool (using PHP, of course!) to index the DocBook sources (takes less than 2 minutes), and transform the XML into HTML on-the-fly.

You only need to re-index the content if you add a new node or a new XML file. Any changes you make to your docs are then "instantly" visible in your browser.

It's almost the same as having a WYSIWYG editor, but without the agony of fighting with their "intelligent" code mangling.

I'm planning to package this up as a more generic tool (so that I can apply it to my own internal documentation) and make it available for download from http://thebrainroom.com/opensource/livedocs.php.

continue reading …