Document optimization

[lwlwilliam]

Is there a plan to add version switching for official documents like the symfony document? Of course, the workload may be a bit heavy.

[pronskiy]

We discussed this with @Girgias some time ago. It makes sense, and it would also allow slim documentation down by dropping some old PHP 5 stuff. But as you said, it's quite a rework.

@lwlwilliam, could you create an issue on https://github.com/php/doc-en/issues?

[Girgias]

I'm on my phone so going to be a bit brief.

But the current documentation is not at all set up for per-version documentation. Other than the infrastructure problems, one other issue is that a lot of non bundled PHP extension are part of the manual and have their own process (or lack thereof) e.g. MongoDB.

The only thing we could really do "fast" is archive the current doc and then provide it "as is" but that would mean bugfixes to the documentation would only be applied to "latest" PHP release rather than all.

Also this could affect translation in ways that have not been determined.

[lwlwilliam]

Is it still certain to carry out this work?

[Girgias]

The manual is really not set-up to work that way, and this is probably going to put even more burden on the documentation team and translations, which are small. So no, it is very unlikely. And I still struggle to see the major benefit.

People already don't want us to drop the documentation for PHP 7.