PHP-Based Manual Apps

Question

Are there any well-made web apps for writing tehcnical/API type manuals? I've got some code I want to write some "getting started" guides for and maybe some reference content.

PHPDocumentor is all fine and good for documenting my class heirarchy, but I also want to put something together that is a bit more human readable and linear. I suppose a general CMS would work fine, or just building something from scratch. But if there is anything that has been designed specifically with writing online manuals in mind, I'd love to find out more.

Answer 1

Most write their documentation in a wiki-like service. Google code has one, or you can install your own, such as MediaWiki or Trac.

Answer 2

DocBook would be one of the ways to write a manual, but I don't know of any CMS for it. I've had my share of it working on PEAR and so far I've always used a regular text editor to write/edit pages. I imagine, starting from scratch is harder.

If you need something more intuitive, try dokuwiki. It's pretty small and lightweight, and it works.

Also, keep in mind that phpdoc allows you to embed code samples etc., so maybe look into that one as well (for example: inline {@example}).

Answer 3

I don't know if it would do the job for you, but the entire manual of PHP that is available online via www.php.net is an open source application.

Don't know about its internals, but looks good enough from the user POV.

Answer 4

I found these links a while ago....

http://www.winnershtriangle.com/w/Products.PHPDocumentationTool.asp

http://doc.php.net/php/dochowto/

enjoy...

Answer 5

restructured text is a popular choice in the Python community.