The PHP manual currently contains documentation for both PHP itself and numerous independently maintained third-party extensions.
While these extensions are maintained outside of php-src, their documentation is maintained within the official PHP documentation repositories and infrastructure. This creates ambiguity regarding ownership and maintenance responsibilities for documentation quality, issue triage, translations, and technical correctness.
This RFC proposes separating third-party extension documentation from the official PHP manual while continuing to use the existing documentation tooling and infrastructure.
For the purposes of this RFC:
php-src repository (e.g., ext/pdo, ext/reflection, ext/curl, ext/mbstring). These remain in the official PHP manual and are out of scope for this RFC.php-src, typically distributed via PECL, PIE or independently, whose documentation is currently hosted in the official PHP manual (e.g., imagick, redis, mongodb, xdebug, memcached).Accept a policy to separate documentation for independently maintained third-party extensions from the official PHP manual.
To summarize the policy from a high-level perspective, the policy specifies:
php-src.www.php.net/manual/. The specific location is subject to a secondary vote.
Bundled extensions such as ext/pdo, ext/reflection, and other extensions distributed as part of php-src are explicitly out of scope for this RFC and remain part of the official PHP manual.
The following extensions are currently documented in the official PHP manual but maintained outside php-src. This list is indicative and will be finalized during implementation:
The following extensions are currently documented in the official PHP manual
but maintained outside php-src. This list is indicative and will be
finalized during implementation.
These extensions were previously bundled but have since been removed or moved to PECL. Their documentation will be migrated together with the active third-party extensions, unless decided to archive them:
Including third-party extensions within the official PHP manual creates ambiguity regarding whether an extension is officially part of PHP itself.
Separating third-party extension documentation makes it clearer to users that these extensions are independently maintained ecosystem projects rather than bundled PHP functionality.
Third-party extensions are maintained independently from PHP itself, but their documentation is currently maintained within the official PHP documentation repositories.
This creates unclear expectations regarding:
Separating third-party extension documentation aligns documentation ownership with extension maintainership.
Including third-party extensions in the official documentation repositories increases maintenance and translation burden for the PHP documentation team. Changes often take long to land because fact-checking them is difficult without owning the extension, and extension maintainers are not always responsive or may abandon the extension entirely.
Extension maintainers are generally the people most familiar with extension behavior and are therefore better positioned to maintain accurate documentation.
The intention is to minimize disruption for users by providing redirects from existing documentation URLs where technically feasible.
However, this RFC changes the location and workflow for maintaining third-party extension documentation. Documentation changes for third-party extensions will no longer be made through the official PHP documentation repositories.
Migration will proceed in two phases:
For each migrated extension:
Primary Vote requiring a 2/3 majority to accept the RFC:
Secondary Vote (simple majority, only counted if primary passes):
Links to proof of concept PR.
If there is no patch, make it clear who will create a patch, or whether a volunteer to help with implementation is needed.
After the RFC is implemented, this section should contain:
Links to external references, discussions, or RFCs.
Keep this updated with features that were discussed on the mail lists.
If there are major changes to the initial proposal, please include a short summary with a date or a link to the mailing list announcement here, as not everyone has access to the wikis' version history.