Hello Internals, By way of introduction, I am Roman Pronskiy, Operations Manager / Executive Director at the PHP Foundation. I have contributed to and coordinated the PHP 8 release page in the past: https://github.com/php/web-php/commits?author=pronskiy.
I wanted to address a few important matters regarding the maintenance and improvement of the PHP website. 1. Unresolved GitHub Issues Many issues and pull requests on GitHub remain unresolved for extended periods. It would be great to do regular triage and assign these issues to specific team members for review and resolution. I volunteer to help review and triage issues, and kindly request php/web-team membership. 2. Analytics It is hard to make any decisions without having a reliable source of stats and data. With more than 17,000 pages, updating all of them is impractical. Analytics, among other things, will help us prioritize updates based on page importance. Using a self-hosted Matomo instance seems a viable option for this. Derick Rethans will follow up with more details. 3. Deployment Process Recently, there was an incident with a code block pushed to the website accidentally: https://github.com/php/web-php/pull/1021. It was promptly reverted, but the case highlighted a potential security risk: unauthorized modifications could go unnoticed, potentially affecting all visitors of the php.net website worldwide. In theory, malicious code could be added to the server directly if access is compromised, with high chances of being unnoticed. We need to revise our deployment process to mitigate such risks and reduce manual maintenance. Derick and I will follow up on this. 4. Regression Testing We want to introduce visual regression testing and ensure that every pull request undergoes more thorough review. This would especially help review HTML/CSS changes, where we currently have few resources for manual testing. If anyone has expertise in this area and would like to review the changes, please check the PR: https://github.com/php/web-php/pull/994. I’d like to volunteer to help improve the PHP website and coordinate efforts. Looking forward to your feedback. -Roman Pronskiy The PHP Foundation
