Question

There are lots of IDEs for PHP development, but I’m curious about all the OTHER brilliant little tools and apps and websites that people use every day to make PHP development a little easier.

Answer 1

I have a whole list of tools that I can’t live without:

• Eclipse with PHP Development Tools (or Zend Studio for Eclipse) – Both of these are great IDEs with awesome PHP editing features. They also both give CSS and JavaScript (JS) editing capabilities now. With the existing Eclipse extensions, you can get a ton of functionality out of the box
• Notepad++ – Great little text editor with syntax highlighting and tabs. I use this for quick edits and editing huge text files that slow down eclipse.
• Filezilla – If you’re on Windows, then I suggest Filezilla as the FTP application of choice. It works great, is relatively fast, and is free.
• PuTTY – You’ll need to SSH into remote servers some times. Use this for your terminal commands. I use it every single day.
• Browsers – You’re going to need to test so you should have every browser you reasonably can installed on your system. Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, etc.
• Firebug – The ultimate front end debugging tool. I cannot count the number of times Firebug has helped me decipher problems with my code or a legacy system that I’m working on.
• FirePHP – Another great tool. This one hooks into Firebug and allows you to utiliize a server side PHP library to generate custom headers that will be output as log messages. You can log arrays, strings, ints, doubles, etc.
• SVN – This is an obvious one. If you’re not using source control in some way, then you’re just not developing safely. On windows, I use TortoiseSVN except when I’m in my IDE, then I use the built-in SVN support.
• Redmine – Awesome project management tool (in RoR) that makes my life infinitely easier. It is very customizable and will help you have a good workflow throughout a project.
• Harvest – Hosted time tracking with widgets for most major operating systems. If you’re developing, you better be tracking your time so you know where it is going.
• Adobe CS – If you’re working with designers at all, then they’re going to be sending you PSD files that you need to code. If you don’t have the Adobe Create Suite (some version) then you’re going to be at a serious disadvantage.
• jQuery – I hate writing JavaScript without a library anymore. jQuery is awesome and it makes you feel like you can do anything at any time. Its collection of plugins is similarly amazing and I recommend this JS framework over any other.

That’s pretty much all I can think of off the top of my head, but it is pretty much everything I use every day.