Searching For A Good PHP Development Environment?

kill-9.ws asks: "I'm a PHP developer, and up until this point, I've been using either Pico or EMACS to write all of my code. A text editor is fine for writing PHP, but I'm starting to look for more. I'd like to have some nice things like an editor that can do syntax highlighting for PHP and perhaps a function reference. Throw in a built-in FTP client, and that would be perfect. Does anyone know if such a thing exists?"

Comments

Here are some editors with PHP syntax highlighting

[buttfucker2000]

Windows
Good:
Php Coder - builtin interpreter and function reference
EditPlus
Bad:
MPS PHP Editor
Indifferent:
HTML-Kit
Unix

*strike*code warrior*strike*Latte*strike*Glimmer

- this is the best notepad-style (with tabs for multiple files) Unix text editor - extensible, with adjustable background images, etc., scriptable in Python
[note the syntax highlighting file is suboptimal -

should be

Crossplatform
Emacs
Vim (PHP highlighting not very good)

But basically my personal recommendations:
syntax highlighting good, all else redundant

So choose the best editor out there; there's not much else you can do with PHP - it's not WYSIWYG suitable, and the functions are so high level, things *like* dialog editors are redundant. As for ftp, I strongly recommend that if you're on Unix, you install your system's PHP & Apache packages, and on Windows install PHP Triad, an integrated MySQL/PHP/Apache installer. This way you don't have to worry about FTP till you're finished [just a warning: always make sure your local PHP is *older* (or the same) as the one on the web server - v3, apart from having fewer functions, also has a lot of weird and undocumented bugs and misfeatures - e.g., you get errors if you call something $file (or class file); in v4 you can instantiate

class classname {
// No constructor
}

with $object=new classname();
but v3 only allows brackets when the class has a constructor.

Here's how I work:

editor w/syntax highlighting, editing files direct - so much nicer than FTP, and without the FTP problems
browser window set to PHP manual (locally, for speed)
browser set to view PHP pages (Opera is good for this purpose because of its MDI (hint: use 4 and 5 to tab between windows), which generally sucks, but is good in this case cos you don't have to open lots of windows)

K PHP Develop

[Jason W]

There hasn't been much activity from the project lately, and I haven't tried it myself, but from the screenshots it looks like just what you need. SourceForge project page, and homepage.