PHP Documentation Generator

I recently used the PHP Documentation Generator and found it to be quite useful. It is a Perl script that functions similarly to javadoc, allowing a set of HTML pages to be generated from comments in PHP source files. The script parses PHP source code to detect objects attached to comments, making it easy to generate documentation.

There are several options available, including the ability to set the name of the default package, the title of the documentation that appears in the summary, and to exclude specific files or groups of files from being parsed. There is even an option to force phpdocgen to use a specified extended scanner, although this option is not officially supported.

If the -o option is not given, the -f or force option can be used to overwrite into the default output directory. Another interesting feature is the ability to set filters for recognizing PHP files. Filters can be a list of filters separated by a colon and the shell wildcards can be used. The default filter is "*.php*".

The requirements for this software are fairly minimal, with only Perl needed. Several bugfixes are included in the latest release, and there is now even a Debian package available. Overall, the PHP Documentation Generator is an excellent choice for generating documentation from PHP source files.