The PHP website is indeed one of the worst parts of the whole ecosystem. Just look at the landingpage (https://php.net) and compare it with those of other languages. There's not a single piece of PHP code on the page. No "what is PHP", no "why should I use it", and no "that's why PHP is great". It's just a news page showing the latest releases, and a small section for downloading PHP.

And speaking of the website: the docs always have been a pain to use. Even the man pages of most decade old CLI tools have a better documentation. The docs basically only list the functions, explain what they do in cryptic one-sentence descriptions and list the parameters. There are no user-friendly explanations and no curated examples. There's indeed a lot of room for improvements.

FWIW, i'll disagree. i was a _huge_ PHP fan from around 1999 until 2010, but two things finally killed it for me:

1) It's apparently impossible to cleanly structure large projects with PHP. i've been a part of many such projects across a large handful of teams, and every one of them eventually became a complete mess, structurally speaking, no matter how conscientious the developers were. Java, for example, forces a directory structure onto developers. PHP is more C-like in that regard - "do whatever you want" - and i've yet to see that end well for older/larger projects.

2) Breaking age-old working features with new releases, like when they removed split or join or implode or explode (two of the four, but i don't recall which). When they did that, and my decade-old website suddenly stopped working, i lost all motivation to continue maintaining sites in PHP. Dropped it that very day (for my personal sites) and have not looked back. i still had to use it in commercial projects off and on through 2014, and each one only help cement point #1 for me.

i don't miss it.