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I hate PHP. I actually passionately hate PHP. I took it off my CV a few years ago for a reason.

There's also a lot of PHP questions that are turning up lately.

It certainly feels like 90% of these are duplicates of each other.

I'm not sure of the best way to go about sifting through the pile, but I think it can be narrowed down into the following.

  • Upgrading PHP
  • XAMPP/WAMP/LAMP bundles (strictly offtopic anyway)
  • Apache config problems (a bigger problem, and another story entirely)
  • How-to do X Y Z in PHP (Belongs on SO (but I bet they don't want them either).
  • Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated X) (tried to allocate Y bytes)

The Out of Memory ones are easy. Close as duplicate to the best answered question that just says "Ram is cheap".

If anyone asks "Where should we store sessions" the answer is "Memcached".

Yeahh.

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    Additional point: Running more than one PHP version under apache (see e.g. serverfault.com/questions/520842/…
    – Jenny D
    Commented Jul 5, 2013 at 9:09
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    If you can make the canonical q&a like the one for cron then it may be useful but if it ends up like the one for mod_rewrite then it will be less so as (I think) it's too like reading the documentation which people fail at anyway.
    – user9517
    Commented Jul 5, 2013 at 12:17

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Just because we hate something doesn't get it out of the universe of production systems (unfortunately - I'm looking at you SCO). PHP was the de facto web language for *nix systems for a good long while, and we'll be supporting its legacy for the foreseeable future.

That said, I believe we should find and/or create canonical questions where they make sense.
I don't think canonical answers for these make sense though (Perhaps the "multiple versions" one - we can pick the best of those and canonize it).

Upgrading PHP
Frankly, RTFM or GTFO.
This is right up there with "How do I upgrade Postgres" questions: they are almost invariably asked by someone who has not actually read the relevant sections of the documentation. I have no patience for this crap anymore. If the question is "HALP! DO MY UPGRADZ FOR ME!" the question gets closed with a polite RTFM link.
Conversely if the question is about something specific in the upgrade process it probably can't be answered canonically. It needs to be a well-researched question and then it's something we can answer with some degree of value.

...And the rest I agree with Tom's assessment.

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    You're not obligated to answer anyone's questions. You don't have to feel so frustrated.
    – Kevin Beal
    Commented Jul 13, 2013 at 21:07

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