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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

Less ugly, and yet not less ugly enough.

jQuery might've over-done it a bit with their most recent refresh, but that's a better example of what could be done.

The search feature, for instance, is complete garbage. If I'm typing in a method name, give me that method, not this: http://ca2.php.net/results.php?q=mysql_query&l=en&p=all

Is it so hard to do something like auto-complete? Wikipedia and many other API references do this.

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If you know the method you're looking for you can just go to php.net/methodname and it'll take you right there or search if it doesn't match anything. Has done for at least a decade. One of my favorite things about their site.

The search does have auto-complete and shows function names. Try reloading?

It wasn't there when I tried it, but now it works.

Small things like this matter.

Read this without snark: do people use on-site search anymore? I and every dev I work with either googles function names or uses hinting in an IDE. Granted, that's a relatively small sample size.

At least using Opera or FF, you can just right-click any text input and create a search from it, so entering "php blah" in the address bar would search php.net for "blah". So yes, I use it on-site searches all the time. Why google for "foobar wikipedia" when I can just enter "wp foobar"? :)

I was doing the same until I realized that googling or binging (let's not rely on google too much) is most of the times faster than using php.net's own search engine. Plus, you're not limited to function names and you don't have to spell them correctly to find the right result.

Fair enough, but I still think that on-site search is desirable in general and many cases. I get that it's too much hassle for small sites, but for bigger ones, I wish they'd at least offer "bingle custom search" additional to their own. Completely outsourcing that is a step back to me, but then again I don't have to pay for the servers so I'll shut up now :D

IMO php "documentation" is different from any other language because the comments can be as important as the official description. This is especially true when the documentation wording is misleading, or there are some traps when using a function in specific contexts, etc. Or functions only available on recent version will have comments with workarounds for older versions.

If you do any JavaScript development, you'll need to search for "mdc keyword" constantly which is annoying. Having a context-specific search is always better, especially if you bind that to a hot-key in your browser to launch it quickly.

You still have to know what you're looking for. The way I work with the Php website - is something like - I kind of remember a function name and try and search for that through a search engine.

What I find difficult on the old site, and this beta site, is getting to the meat. I just can't grok the navigation.

I find the new site harder to read. I can't get to it in Chrome (not working), and it feels very amateurish. The only welcome addition - is being able to vote up comments and autocompletion/suggestions on the search.

Yuck.

If you use autocomplete and press down->enter, it goes to the function page.

in emacs C-c C-f opens a web browser with php.net function name that is highlighted opened.

This is a feature of your editor, not the PHP site.

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