Documentation structure

The PHP Manual sources are stored in Git repositories.

To checkout the PHP Manual sources, follow the steps in Setting up a documentation environment

File structure

Note for translators: if any of the source files don't exist in your translation, the English content will be used during the building process. This means that you must not place untranslated files in your translation tree. Otherwise, it will lead to a mess, confusion and may break some tools.

The structure of the manual sources is hopefully rather intuitive. The most complicated part is the documentation for extensions, which is also the biggest part of the manual as all functions are grouped into extensions.

The documentation for extensions is located in reference/extension_name/. For example, the calendar extension documentation exists in reference/calendar/. There you'll find several files:

• book.xml - acts as the container for the extension and contains the preface. Other files (like examples.xml) are included from here.
• setup.xml - includes setup, install and configuration documentation
• constants.xml - lists all constants that the extension declares, if any
• configure.xml - usually this information is in setup.xml, but if the file exists it is magically included into setup.xml
• examples.xml - various examples
• versions.xml - contains version information for the extension
• foo.xml - example, foo can be anything specific to a topic. Just be sure to include via book.xml.

A procedural extension (like calendar) also has:

• reference.xml - container for the functions, rarely contains any info
• functions/ - folder with one XML file per function that the extension declares

And OO extensions (such as imagick) contain:

• classname.xml - container for the methods defined by the class, contains also basic info about it
• classname/ - folder with one XML file per method that the class declares

Note: classname is the lowercased name of the class, not a literal file or directory name.

There are some other important files:

• language-defs.ent - contains local entities used by this language. Some common ones are the main part titles, but you should also put entities used only by this language's files here.
• language-snippets.ent - longer often used XML snippets translated to this language. Including common warnings, notes, etc.
• translation.xml - this file is used to store all central translation info, like a small intro text for translators and the persons list. This file is not present in the English tree.

xml:id structure

The PHP Manual is complex, and uses xml:ids extensively, for various purposes. So some care is necessary to avoid failures. There are two types of xml:ids used in manuals.

• Structural IDs: IDs that are present on structural elements of DocBook XML (like <chapter>, <section> and so on), that are used for linking and chunking;

• XInclude IDs: IDs that are used as target of XIncludes.

Structural IDs are in the pattern id.id (always one dot as separator), while XInclude IDs use the pattern structural.id..local.name. That is, for Structural IDs the name parts are separated with a single dot, while XInclude IDs are composed of an Structural ID prefix, a double dot separator, and a named suffix.

The configure.php script will remove any duplicated IDs found. Without warnings in the case of XInclude IDs, so it is possible to use XInclude IDs elsewhere, and will warn about duplicate Structural IDs.