hi.. i wanted to thank you all for the hard work on the documentation.. i know it's probably really hard to keep up with all the changes and the like. i would also like to thank you for the 'content-management' style of running the site, where users can make additions/comments to the manual pages. this is VERY helpful! something i always wanted in web sites, and you have made it a reality. those comments are GOLD!!! so thanks.

i was wondering whether i might be helpful in adding in some thoughts for future versions of the manual/docs? even with the manual as it is, i still had many problems setting up my php (on redhat 7.3 linux) to connect to our (remote) interbase server. there just are so little docs, and the page on 

1) on http://www.php.net/manual/en/ in section IV (Function Reference) it took me the longest time to find the ODBC functions. for a while i didn't even think they were listed there -- thought it was a mistake of ommission. so i'd click on any other database function and then once on *that* page, i'd use the menu on the LHS which *did* have a simple entry to 'ODBC'. finally, after a few days of doing it this way, i decided (bone-headed that i am) late to try searching through the document and found "Unified ODBC functions".. there all the time.

i can see why it was titled this way, but i had been searching (rather tunnel-vision-ously) for "ODBC functions" and never found them. so it's such a little thing, but i think under "Unified", it's sort of "hidden"..

2) also, under same section, since every item has the word "function" at the end, and the section does have "Function" in the title ("Function Reference"), might it clean things up a bit and make them easier to scan/find to remove the trailing "functions" from every item in that section?

3) on http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.odbc.php where it says, "The following databases are supported by the Unified ODBC functions:", since interbase works (but is not documented, really), should interbase(http://www.borland.com/interbase) maybe be added?

4) i did find getting a php-interbase connection quite a struggle, so when i did get it up and running, i put a page up on php.faqts:

http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/18951/fid/679

but it really would be nice if included in future versions of the manual, we had examples of step-by-step setup for each db back-end (assuming the db server is already set up)..

in my case, i just needed to get the client libraries, but couldn't figure out how to get them. there was a page (i can't find right now) on your site referring to compile-time options, but i also figured out (myself) that i might be able to use ODBC. but i couldn't find anything on odbc and linux on the web site.

however, there is a faq on database issues at http://www.php.net/manual/en/faq.databases.php which does address as part of its first question how to get *client only* libraries for free for sybase. i finally figured out how to do this with linux (after 2 days of searching) and it would be nice to have a similar pointer to each of the others, as well..

5) i would have benefited from ODBC examples tailored to each system (when usage varies, as it does with interbase, and apparently, from the comments, with MS SQL Server). again, i added such a page to php faqts:

http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/18988

but in future versions of the manual it might be nice to work these types of things in..

anyway, i hope these help in any way.. if not, then file13 'em.. and once again, thank you..

oh yeah, one more suggestion, on this page (http://bugs.php.net/report.php) itself: i do only have php-4.1.2-7 from redhat, but it is telling me i need to select a valid PHP version.. but i am making a website suggestion.. it would be nice if this option did not appear (or at very least were not required) when making a web request.. i finally ended up lying and putting a new version.. :) :)