This style guide affects the PHP Manual.

We follow the following style guide as a base:

• A first-person active voice is preferred, which also means do not address the reader directly as “You”
• We follow the Fedora Style Guide

• The refpurpose should not end with a period
• Indenting is one space, and never tabs
• Whitespace changes should never be mixed with content changes
• Text that's repeated 3x or more should be defined as an entity within language-snippets.ent
• Many words, such as TRUE, FALSE, and NULL, should use the entity versions instead, like &true;
• Using <para> or <simpara> does not matter, but <para> is preferred
• Constants should be surrounded with <constant>, like <constant>PHP_EOL</constant>
• Functions should be surrounded with <function>, like <function>strlen</function> (Or, <methodname> for methods)
• Variables should be surrounded with <varname> like <varname>$foo</varname>
• … Create “common docbook tag usages” instead of repeating….
• Examples should use the PEAR Coding Standards

• Improper spacing. Mixing tabs with spaces, and indenting
• Long lines. Line width should not exceed 80 characters, although this is a loose requirement. 100 is probably fine, depending on the situation
• Committing leftover/bogus text that was generated using scripts/docgen/docgen.php. This should not be committed
• Windows line endings. Only use Unix line endings
• Having an IDE or Text editor remove trailing whitespace, then mixing it with commits. Don't do this
• Mixing &example.outputs.similar; and &example.outputs; entities. Use the former when the example output may differ, depending on the users usage/settings