Official PHP site will have a new design | Hacker News Reader

Official PHP site will have a new design

prototype.php.net

79 pointsTomek_45 comments

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.

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.

I find them very useful in a "Don't Do What Donny Don't Does" way.

NOT SURE.

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'd agree the current layout for the docs are fine. I think though the front end advertising php and providing news/ downloads could use a new look.

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.

Really hope they don't touch the docs.

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

that's my only gripe

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?

If you think about it, PHP's biggest strenght is its ecosystem right now, which comes from popularity.

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 quite like it. I don't think it's too bad as a standalone site but compared the previous one, it's amazing.

I do like the documentation menu. Similar to the way Codeigniter does it.

The menu completely fails to work without JavaScript. Is it really that difficult to design things properly and provide a graceful fallback?

I hadn't noticed that. Not sure why they can't have the href point to the docs page and use JS to show the fancy menu if enabled.

Then again, this is still a prototype. Hopefully someone will fix this before switching over.

I think it looks great.

My only comment is: put the class synopses (?) in a fixed width font (like they are. In the detail section). It looks odd this way.

+1 for being completely usable on my iPad and not breaking the back button while all still being quite snappy.

FWIW I have no issue with the green. Good work, guys.

Make all the green parts blue and I can accept it.

Green is terrible.

Plus my elePHPant would seem strange in green.

Yeh green be the least compatible colour in existence

And yet, most of the world is green.

the light green fits but not the one on top.

pretty sure that's just a dev banner

actually most of the world is blue

Yes, the green really doesn't fit with the violet and purple highlights.

This new design has been around for quite a while...

Have you seen PEAR2? http://pear2.php.net/

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?

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:

About time! Still needs some changes here and there, but it is on the right track.

The Wayback machine shows me that the current design is nearly 11 years old.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010401091809/http://php.net/

I don't like it. IMO the colors are really off.

Looking good. Seems like the underlying code is the same. Only an aesthetic change. But the search may be a bit changed..

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 am not a very big fan of the gigantic fold-out navigation bar.

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!

My thoughts:

* The animation (click 'Documentation') is too slow. As likely the most visited link, this needs to be instantaneous.

* The top bar takes too much vertical space.

It does look better than the current site, but does it really need that bar of images at the top of the page?

But the current website fits PHP code so well! Both are really ugly to look at!

Now, if only they improved the language next...

7 years overdue. Better than the old design.

More repulsive than what's already there.

yes. I think it was the time.

Just don't!

OH GOD MY EYES

Horrible, too cluttered.

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.

<?=exit(1);?>

I am a Python developer who started with PHP.

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.

This from the PHP developer that tries to print an exit function.

<?php exit; ?>

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