Nowadays, phpDocumentor version 2 is probably the best option out there as it has a good architecture, it works fine, it is extensible, and quite a few big PHP projects is already using it. And that's fine. I don't want to compete with it, I don't want to replace it, I'm just open sourcing some code used by Symfony, Twig, and Silex because I'm not comfortable with closed-source software. And to be totally honest and transparent, I have not released the code before because it was not "good enough".

He gives an example of how to install and use Sami - configuring the directories to parse and setting up a custom theme for the resulting generated documentation (using regular CSS and HTML definitions).

Announcing phpDocumentor 2 - the merging of the old (phpDocumentor) and the new (DocBlox). With the first alpha release of phpDocumentor (2.0.0a1), the new "Responsive" default template sports a new page layout, along with the useful layout improvements that the original DocBlox templates provided (which remain available) over the old phpDocumentor templates (which will retire with old phpDocumentor). Explore this new template at http://demo.phpdoc.org/Responsive/index.html.

Users of the current phpDocumentor software (version 1.x) will need to upgrade their documentation and installations. If you'd like more information about the transition or just keep up with the latest on this exciting advancement, check out #phpdocumentor on Freenode IRC or follow @phpdocumentor on Twitter.

I spoke in the unconference at PHPUK last week, on running an open source project. I thought I would collect together my thoughts into one place. [...] These are the things that, having been project lead on joind.in for a while, I think are important.

She talks about:

• The importance of fostering a good community around the project
• Providing good documentation (README in this case) for people new to the project
• Having a clear vision of the future of the project (roadmap)
• Dealing with the code contributed to the project - good and bad
• Having transparency with the contributors and anyone wanting to find out more about the project

Want to get involved? Check out Joind.in on github for more details and the source for the site.

It seems that the editor of the moment is Sublime Text 2 and sadly I have to tip my hat to Gary Rockett for showing it off to me one day.. Since that day, I've been a 100% convert. [...] So, I decided to peak into the PHPUnit [plugin from Stuart Herbert] to see if I could create a DocBlox Plugin. It turns out you have to write Plugins in Python, which is interesting, since I know very little python. There seemed to be enough code there to get me going, so I now have a working DocBlox Plugin.

The result is a plugin that, once installed gives you a new context menu option to "Generate documentation" for the selected file. The console shows the progress of the build. You can get the plugin from Package Control or by grabbing it from github directly.

Want to generate documentation for your PHP project, but keep putting it off? Can't be bothered wading thigh deep in documentation, screaming WHY WON'T IT WORK as you try to set it up? Look no further. DocBlox is pain free and you'll be up and running, literally in a few minutes.

She includes a guide to getting the latest DocBlox installed and configured to work with your project. The configuration is a straight-forward XML file, so changing the settings to match your needs is easy (more on the config here). Once this is configured, building your documentation is one command away. For more details on DocBlox, check out the project's website.

About to dive into MVC and wondering which one has the most wealth in terms of documentation/code comments as well as a decent community.

Suggestions in the comments include both old and new options including:

• Symfony
• CodeIgniter
• Zend Framework
• Yii

If you're writing code that will be shared with others, put yourself in their shoes. Don't let your project lose potential users, community members, and possible contributors all because of insufficient documentation.

He (Matthew Turland) suggests a few things to keep in mind as you're writing up your documentation - the content is "king" (an emphasis on good descriptions/examples/use cases), open it up to external contributions using things like wikis (or even stored in the source code repository) and a focus on technical writing skills. Even the best tools out there can suffer if there's poor or no documentation.

Alessandro Nadalin signals these three options for Api documentation generation, the process of extracting Api informations on classes and methods from a folder full of source code: phpDocumentor, doxygen and DocBlox. A PHP tool, faster than doxygen in implementing new features, and actively developed: these are the factors that made me choose DocBlox as my new default Api documentation mean.

He covers the installation of the tool (from its PEAR channel), some of the features it comes with, a link to their demo and some of his impressions after trying it out on his codebase.

Unfortunately I've come across too many lines of code that were just lines of code, no comments or annotations provided. So, in best cases I could guess the types and parameters, but in many it was too obfuscated. I already talked about usage of a code sniffer like PHP_CodeSniffer in my previous post where you can validate the usage of comments in the code. But forcing developers (using a pre-commit checker) into writing documentation with their code is not really a good thing.

He suggests using something like PHPDocumetor (there's other PHPDoc parsers including DocBlox and Doxygen out there) to automatically generate documentation for your code based on its comments, giving your developers easier web-based access to the contents. He includes some sample docblocks for a class/method and gives an example command line call to build docs based on a project. A screencast and screenshot of the generated site shows the results of the run.

Today Rasmus mentioned that he received a $500 offer for the php.net domain name. Discussion ensued, which ultimately led to the indisputable belief that php.net is worth over 10 million US dollars. Therefore, let's think about this further...

He compares the worth of several popular languages (with a "reliable source") and does some math where PHP.net account holders would profit from the popularity over other languages. On a bit more serious note, though, he points out a few ways that you can contribute or get involved in the PHP project on several fronts:

• Help by editing documentation
• Sign up for a mailing list or three
• Get a SVN account and start contributing back to the code