Looking at it again, anything thats doesn' require external libraries
or special installation should be in e new section 'Extended Functions' or something, and the Core stuff in 'Core Functions'

I might get to undertand what its all about!

We are working on restructuring the documentations, see http://docs.php.net/funcref

http://docs.php.net/manual/en/refs.basic.text.php

Feedback is greatly appreciated.

@bjori,

It looks better. Personally I would still split it up into PHP Core and Extended Functions.

It still take a lot of digging and its almost impossible to determine the full capability of basic PHP here. 

Session Handling - Everyone uses these and needs to know about them. Not many are interested in Mohawk, muscat or SessionPgsql (I would guess).

We already have that list: http://no.php.net/manual/en/extensions.membership.php

That list however was removed in the new reference structure, I suppose we should add it in again.

Bjori,
     personally, I think thats fantastic. That URL shows me a whole shedload of information about PHP which I didnt know before and which isn't so upfront as I think it should be. I don't think it needs to be presented as 'Membership' though. I think that term is unnecessarily obscure.

I suggest:

Functions
    Core Functions
    Bundled Functions
    Extended Functions

     Again, personally, I think that's the way it should be presented in the manual. It says a whole lot more about PHP than the way it is at the moment.

     Thats my feeling as a relative PHP newbie and as someone with more than 20 years in the business. I could understand though that someone with more experience who just wanted to quickly lookup the parameters for a function for example, wouldn't want to drill through three or so layers, but if there's a solution to this (a second access path, maybe alphabetical), then this should be presented in a section afterwards or as an appendix.

http://php.net/funcref does link to the extension categorization page.
http://php.net/urlhowto explains ways to find function/extensions quickly.

Most people search for extensions/functions that they need. If the extension is not enabled by default, or distributed via pecl, doesn't matter. If you need it, you need it.

This bug has been fixed in the documentation's XML sources. Since the
online and downloadable versions of the documentation need some time
to get updated, we would like to ask you to be a bit patient.

Thank you for the report, and for helping us make our documentation better.

The extension listing appendix ("membership" and "state" listing) has been re-added.
The default listing (presented by /funcref) is the 'purpose' listing.