The PHP documentation is actively worked on each day, and the quality of work is enhanced by both peer review (reviewing each others commits) and communication. There are several mailing lists used to meet these goals including:
You may subscribe to a mailing list by sending a blank email that utilizes the appropriate subscribe command. For example, to subscribe to the main list, write a blank mail to » phpdoc-subscribe@lists.php.net. Similarly you may unsubscribe by sending a blank mail to » phpdoc-unsubscribe@lists.php.net. There is a web interface for these tasks at » http://www.php.net/mailing-lists.
There are also separate mailing lists for translation groups, where native language discussions may go on and where language specific SVN commits are posted to. These mailing lists are named in the form of doc-LANGCODE where LANGCODE is the same language code used in the SVN module name. You can subscribe to / unsubscribe from these mailing lists the same way as above explained, substituting phpdoc in the email addresses with your list name. A sample list name is doc-zh for the Simplified Chinese list.
Currently these translation lists receive messages from the following senders:
You should be able to handle the traffic of the mailing lists you are subscribed to, but just in case you need to go for a long summer break, and you need to unsubscribe, there are other methods to read the messages after you come back:
The commit messages coming from the SVN server, that are larger then 8kb, are put into attachments. You can always see the commit message and file list in the body, but the diff is in an attachment.
The Windows HTMLHelp Edition of the manual has a separate mailing list for CHM related discussions and announcements. You can subscribe to this mailing list at » http://www.php.net/mailing-lists using the web interface.
There is also a mailing list named php-notes. You can access it the same way as the phpdoc list (just substitute phpdoc with php-notes). This list is the place where all the manual notes are posted. You may consider subscribing to this mailing list if you would like to help manage the notes. See the next section for more information on note editing guidelines.
There is also a list named doc-license, which is set up for those who would like to get involved in the process of deciding who can do what with the PHP manual. The common rule is that, in addition to the rules set forth in the license, we try to get people publishing modified versions of the manual to contribute some improvements into the manual, fix errors they find, etc. You can subscribe to this list as described at Mailing Lists, Newsgroups and SVN Modules.
Finally, the doc.php.net site is forming on the doc-web mailing list. This site is supposed to be the meeting point for documentation authors of any of the projects developed on PHP.net.
The following table documents the relations between the different SVN modules, websites, mailing lists and newsgroups. Note that not all documentation sources are built to be available online.