Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy. This forum is not for asking programming related questions.
Bulletin Board tags (or BB tags). They are basically a security replacement for plain HTML but work the same. Click on those one of the buttons, then type some text, then click on it again. Then hit preview and see what happens. The buttons themselves are pretty self-explanatory.
Something like "[php_man]date[/php_man]()" is what I always have been using for referencing functions.
Yeah you need to leave out the parenthesis because the php.net site will not forward you to the right page with those in the URL. But it is good to leave them beside the name of the function to indicate that it is indeed a php function manual page you're linking to.