That said, their documentation is lacking, and broken links abound. I hope they get their act together soon, or they are doomed as the on boarding and troubleshooting experience is terrible.
What's the story..?
But nice try!
Unfortunately, I've experienced nearly every nightmare with the two, thanks to work, bad code, and absent documentation.
I don't want them on my machine.
Any plans for a self-contained bundle?
But creating some sort of bundle with a portable PHP and server, just a zipped folder or something, would hugely reduce the barrier to entry, and reassure people like me who shy away from part of the tech stack.
As for your specific issues, I find it hard to follow your complaint when it comes to docs. Both php and apache httpd projects have extensive, easy to follow documentation.
The docs I referenced are not the official documentation, but rather mind-bendingly bad systems I've had to deal with that were undocumented.
PHP isn't necessarily bad. But bad experiences mean I hate it.
Hide the PHP in a nice self-contained system, and I won't care, plus it'll simplify install/setup.
It sounds like those experiences were the fault of the developers not some intrinsic issue with the language itself. (i.e. its not like say "i hate flash because its a security shit-fueled nightmare").
Either way, the system currently has an "install script" and aims to develop deb/rpm/etc packages to achieve the same result, which seems like it's what you want.