Pear/Pecl website improvement ideas and suggestions

[Gena01]

So I attended the PEAR2 presentation and had a chance to bug the guys behind PEAR/PECL. There's definitely exciting stuff happening and they are pushing forward with many exciting ideas.

Here is a quick summary that I promised to post to Helgi:
1. Documentation - this one is quite important for me since I love and tend to recommend offline documentation in CHM format.
      Currently you can find the documentation via the "Documentation" link in the navigation bar on the top. This will take you to the download/browse documentation page. However once I have CHM downloaded to my desktop the documentation is actually incomplete. The API portion is missing and some tutorials look a bit incomplete or dated. Also once I find the package I am interested in either through Search or through the category links there's a separate documentation link that takes you to API documentation. This one is broken down by version of the package. However i haven't found a way to download it. I might need to take a closer look to make more recommendations here. I would love to see all the documentation somehow organized as a complete set which I can download and use.

2. This one is more PECL related. I would love to see "Package News" feature on a package level. This would allow package authors to post small news items for the package users. This would be quick news announcements or tidbits to update the users of what's going on. The only way that I know of right now is package releases and changelogs. One example is branching the source code and letting the users know which branch to pull when building pecl extensions yourself. Also it would be nice to have users leave comments to these items (ala SourceForge ) One example is OCI8 posting a news item about the BETA release and letting users test specific functionality and commenting back through the comments (perhaps). Right now I think there's no way to provide any form of documentation or news for the users via the PECL package setup that I know of.. maybe I am wrong, but as as user I haven't seen anything like this. Also speaking with some people during the conference they definitely had more tips and insights than what's posted and released to the public. I would love to see such information available to the general public.

Gena01

[Gena01]

Just thought of another small idea/feature.

3. The ability of project author(s) to provide resource links. These could be link(s) to external site(s) like blogs, support forums, etc... I know a number of PEAR/PECL packages have external sites where more information and at times support could be found.

Gena01

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