The Windows HTML Help Edition of the PHP Manual is a stand-alone help file system that was compiled from PHP online version of its help system. It is available in a selection of languages and formats.

Platform: Windows

Coding PHP website is fun and easy. This is mainly because PHP has hundreds of ready-to-use and powerful functions. When you are solving a particular problem, sometimes you will be surprised there are already functions that can be used to solve this problem in one or two lines of code. After a while, it becomes a habit to search for functions to do a particular job - you will want to refer to PHP documentation from time time.

The most comprehensive document about PHP is on PHP official website. I have found loading up PHP site is slow and wanted a local version of the documentation. Luckily, there is a PHP Manual in Windows HTML Help format (Extended CHM format) that even comes with user online comments - exactly what I want!

PHP Manual in Extended CHM format

The Windows HTML Help Edition of the PHP Manual is a stand-alone help file system that was compiled from PHP online version of its help system. It is available in a selection of languages and formats.

The extended format of the PHP Manual is aimed at developers, who want the manual at hand every time, and would like to read manual pages and user notes without having to view it online. This offline edition gives you the full content of the manual plus the user notes and comments.

When you double click on the php_manual_en.chm file, a HTML Help Viewer window opens with three panes. On the left side of the window is the Navigation pane. It contains four navigational tabs: the Contents, Index, Search and Favorites tabs. On the right side of the window is the Topic pane. It displays the selected help topic, or the default help topic on startup.

The help pages are all separate HTML files. The third pane is the toolbar, which is located below the help window title bar. You can adjust the horizontal layout with dragging the vertical border between the Navigation pane and the Topic pane.

Benefits of using PHP Manual in Extended CHM format

1. PHP Manual is in Windows Help File format and is handy for search and bookmarking. Personal favourites listing.

2. Full tree like TOC menu of pages, with even the smallest parts included.

3. Window position and size remembered.

4. Another great feature is that, for topics in the manual, there are tons of extremely useful user contributed notes. Because the manual is locally installed on your computer, you don't need to browse to internet to view these notes.

5. PHP Manual can be integrated with several source code editors. Go to this page to see How to integrate PHP Manual with Crimson Editor for context help.

6. The PHP Manual includes an advanced full text search possibility provided by the viewer application. This enables users to search through every word in the help file to find a match.

To download PHP Manual, go here. Make sure you download the zip file for Extended HTML Help. See screenshot below.

Note that the English version of PHP Manual should be considered the most accurate, since translations of PHP Manual in other languages are based on the English version.