Let's talk about joined effort

[jaapio]

Thanks @stof for reaching out to the phpDocumentor team. I would like to talk to you guys for a moment about the doctrine/rst-parser. Which we integrated in phpDocumentor. More that a year ago we had contact with Jonathan Wage about the library. If I remember it correctly he forked the original library to a doctrine version. Back than there was nearly any maintenance on the lib. And from the doctrine team there was not much interest to support any additional features and improvements. That’s why we (@mvriel and me) have forked the doctrine version and started working on it.

With phpDocumentor we are trying to get a combination of API docs like we are rendering for years, with hand written manuals like doctrine and symfony are providing. In combination with the templates phpDocumentor provides and all static information we know about the code this should raise the level of documentation for PHP in general. That’s our goal.

Beside the missing support from the doctrine team which slowed us down in the additional features for phpDocumentor we wanted to do some large refactoring in the code to make it faster and fit better into the application workflow of phpDocumentor. So we have split the parsing and rendering in our version and some other improvements which allow us in the end to cache the parser results of each document, do some compile steps like we always do on cached items and then start the rendering. This includes also some major changes that are reducing the memory footprint of the library.

But now the there is some more movement on this project I think we can all benefit from the changes we are doing on both sides. And maybe bring it back into a single project which is maintained by all of us.

Please let me know if you are interested to join our forces and make some nice magic happen with the documentation of all the great projects out there.