Originally phpWhois was developed a long ago having support of PHP4 in mind.
Now it is needed to update the codebase to support the modern features like:
- Composer
- Continuous integration service Travis with PHPUnit
- Code quality testing with Scrutinizer
Code must be reworked to support PSR standards.
Current major version of phpWhois is 4. Global new features will be implemented in major version 5.
It is good idea to keep the backwards compatibility for version 5. However applications using version 4 may need to be updated because of using namespaced classes in version 5.
Last few years there was a bunch of new top-level domains spinned by ICANN, including international domains with non-latin symbols.
New TLDs should be monitored and added to phpWhois database.
Having in mind ICANN's great plans for running new TLDs there should be more detailed documentation regarding contributing to repository.
Also we should pay attention to the internal code documenting, which later can be compiled into API documentation with PHPDocumentor.
Maybe there should be additional methods implemented like getDaysToExpire which will be reporting a number of days left to domain expiration