Question

Is there anyway to give text editors summary information in a tooltip for custom functions/classes etc. in the way that they can do for standard libraries while coding?

Failing this what is the standard way to highlight the purpose, required params etc. for a function/class in PHP.

Answer 1

Check out PHPDocumentor.

An example would be:

/**
 * Set the data
 *
 * @access public
 * @param string $field
 * @param mixed $value
 */
public function __set($field, $value)
{
  $this->_data[$field] = $value;
}

/**
 * Get the data
 *
 * @access public
 * @param string $field
 * @return mixed
 */
public function __get($field)
{
  return isset($this->_data[$field]) ? $this->_data[$field] : NULL;
}

As the comments self-explain, you use @access to show the visibility of the method (if the code being summarized is a method, of course), @paramto show each parameter, and @return to show the type of the data being returned. There are many different tags to document many different aspects of the code.