I really like the new design, but as a PHP developer now using Python... the boat has sailed on making the language better, and more appealing with better designed sites.
PHP has it's place and will have for the foreseeable future. Very low entry bar, huge available workforce, Wordpress and other CMS(and an astronomical number of available plugins and themes) being the main reasons.
Most of the web sites will work fine with a combination Wordpres, some plugins and a readily available themes. Wordpress may not be elegant internally, but it just works and that's what 90% of people need.
My only gripe with PHP is that it's very easy to make a mess out of it(compared to other languages) but then no programming language, no matter how elegant, can save the developer from himself.
Looks good. This was really needed IMO. The current site, while perfectly functional, is just ugly and keeping it fresh might help a little with PHP's recent reputation with being quite uncool, because, lets face it, sometimes looks are important.
Wrong redesign IMHO. It's kinda like the new Google thing, better aesthetic proportions , whitespace and shit.. but loss in density and habits. I'd vote for something less bold and more derivative and small step and :loop:
It's been around for ages already - for those who stumble on to the settings part of the site. It takes some time to get use to, but overall I like that they have gone from 90's to 20's era.
I recall using this design a year or so ago.. and I was really hoping they'd change some things about it (mainly the ugly green everywhere..) Unfortunately that's not the case.. Functionally the site is better than the current design though!.. Right?
Looks a lot less dated than the other one so good job on that front.
Not sure if anyone working on the design / copy is reading this, but I'm wondering why they felt compelled to add "popular" to "PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language [...]".
Should people use or be interested in PHP because it's popular? How is this a differentiating feature worth mentioning in the first sentence introducing PHP? (Genuine question, I'm not saying it's wrong for them to call it so)
Also, titling a section "PECL + PEAR" is useless if you don't already know what they are. Why not call it "Extensions & Libraries" or something similarly descriptive and let the acronyms be introduced in the description?
My company does some developments in PHP precisely because it's popular, and nothing else. For everything we don't expect our customers to want to modify by themselves, we use various languages but certainly not PHP.
I really agree on the "Extensions & Libraries" bit. PEAR should not be linked there, it is outdated, filled with really bad pieces of code, and generally not useful at all.
They should really focus on a central library repository, they are alternative out there, but having PHP.net pushing for one (i don't really trust them for creating one) would do a lot of good to the language.
I visit PHP.net around 20 times a day according to my stats. It's the single most efficient website I know for getting what I need, fast. I do not need more white space on that site. It would not improve my user experience.
I'm a big fan of the refresh. I also visit the site several times a day (documentation, not the rest of the site) and this updated design makes it much easier for me to scan.
I think some of the docs should be better structured in terms of seo as some of the deprecated functions index higher in google than the currently supported classes/methods
The biggest thing php.net needs is moderation on the comments. There are some 10+ year old comments that are just wrong now. Cleaning that up and moderating a comment before it is posted would be great.
Should've hired an actual UX and/or Interactive Designer to do the redesign and not leave it in the hands of us developers (again). Hope there are further improvements!
Looks great, it only took about 10 years for an eventual redesign shakes head Maybe this refreshed design will help it seem more "modernized" to keep up with the python/rails designs of being trendy
reply