It occured to me this would make an excellent O'Reilly/Wikibook and kill two birds with one stone. "Learning PHP by example, with MediaWiki" You get the book, and a cover disk with a snapshot of the mediawiki software. It could be a "live" bootable cd, with everything setup and running - or just a specific version of the code. Then, run through the basics of PHP pointing people at specific pages/code in mediawiki as an example. The reader would learn about PHP, and get a fully functioning advanced wiki for their own use. Plus the knowledge to tweak it to their needs. Wikipedia would gain exposure, and if it was published, possibly some revenue to fund other work. Plus an easy way for developers to get involved. Sadly my PHP skills are rubbish, and I too don't have the time, so just throwing in a suggestion. Another take on the same theme would be if someone like O'Reilly were to be interested, they might fund an estalished/star PHP hacker to write the book - which would for a brief window bring in some top-rated skills specifically focused on making the code easier/cleaner (not that I'm suggesting it ain't already ...).

On Nov 29, 2004, at 5:49 AM, Evan Prodromou wrote: Think of the children... won't anybody think of the children?! In all seriousness, MediaWiki is not the prettiest or best PHP codebase I've seen. It's also far from the worst, but this is small consolation if you've ever lurked in comp.lang.php and seen the horrors people post there. ;) The web is full of PHP tutorials. There might even be some good ones out there. The best way to get into PHP in my experience is to just dive in. The online manual at www.php.net is generally easy to search (at lest for functions -- it can be harder to look up things like constants or unusual keywords). The language itself will be pretty familiar to someone who's dabbled in C-like languages or Perl. There are gotchas (as there are in any language) which you're either going to stumble or on someone more experienced is going to point out to you. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)