One of the things I hear from people and my friends is questions about the best way to work with PHP. They always want to know how to get started on a project, what software to use, how to plan it successfully, and so on. In this article I plan on revealing the “magical secrets” about how I do my PHP programming so quickly with so few bugs.
Here’s a really good question: What PHP editor should I use? Personally I use Zend Studio, which can get pretty pricey if you don’t plan on making money from your coding. But it’s by far the best PHP editor I’ve ever used. It has a built-in debugger, or you can install the one that’s made for your server. It will also profile your project so that you know what is taking the longest to parse. But that’s not what makes it so nice of an editor. The fact that it has true PHP auto complete is a big thing to me. It has pretty much all the built-in functions in the auto complete, and it also adds in the variables, functions, and classes that you make into the auto complete features. I’d say overall my programming speed has increased by 75% since I’ve been using Zend Studio. After all, who would make a better editor than the company that basically creates the language?
On the other hand, if your wallet is as empty as a LAN party with no computers, you can always go for Maguma Studio Free. It’s a pretty good editor for free. It has great integration with the PHP documentation and a decent auto complete feature.
And for the hard core “I am PHP” type of programmer, you can always go with Arisesoft Winsyntax, which weighs in as Notepad with PHP syntax highlighting.
That’s really about it for PHP editors, although there are hundreds of them out there. Those three are probably the best in their categories.
