by Joseph Love

Created on: April 08, 2008

With literally hundreds of text editors available, which ones are the best for PHP? Assuming you don't have the cash for a premium development environment like ZEND, we are going to suggest a few you can try out on the net. I will assume that you are developing on the Windows platform locally, with FTP access to your server.

When choosing a PHP editor, I choose editors that are expendable and update-able, and have a community of plugin developers. Graphical Editing, otherwise known as WYSIWYG (What you See is What you Get) is largely inappropriate for PHP development, and thus, is not an important feature in a PHP development platform. The ediors listed below can be described as just souped up notepad's, but they really are big time savers.

The best editor in my opinion is "HTML-KIT" by Chamisoft. This editor is not only free, but has many plugins that are updated daily. Additionally, the Pro version (called HTML Tools) is available for free if you submit a plugin to their library. The free version supports syntax highlighting, built in PHP documentation, bracket mathing, HTML docs, Javascript Docs and will even save files directly to your server using FTP. The free version also supports a wide variety of customizations. You can change the way the syntax highlighting works and even configure how many undo operations are kept. Embedded in HTML-KIT is another tool known as Tidy, which can help you clean up your code and find HTML errors. The PRO version has a built in PHP debugger and previewer, along with many other features you may find useful. HTML Kit is available at www.chami.com .

Another tried and true editor is FirstPage by evrsoft. Although this tool is a little old, its interface is a little simpler than HTML-KIT. This editor has built in FTP functionality and can do some advanced analysis of meta tags, HTML, and search engine optimization. This editor can be downloaded from www.evrsoft.com .

Should you have the money to invest in a professional IDE, I highly recommend Zend Studio. Zend Studio has most of the features found within the other editors as well as many others. Zend Studio includes an advanced debugging environment that supports Breakpoints, watches, timers, and other tools usually available only in desktop languages like C or Visual Basic. One other feature allows you to actually run the PHP on your desktop, without the need to upload the files to your server- allowing for very quick previews, especially handy if you have a slower Internet connection. These features can make Zend Studio worth the $800 price tag, if you are doing a lot of PHP development.

For a list of other editors, both commercial and freeware, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PHP_editors . This site lists editors that run in Windows, Linux, Macintosh and other environments.

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