Justin Silverton has a list up of his top 5 PHP tools and the comments on his page are quite disparaging.
I thought I’d just drop my current favourite 5 PHP tools.
- XDebug is an awesome PECL extension which gives you a bunch of debugging and profile tools – it takes a lot less setup than PHP for Eclipse or the ZDE debugger/profiler too
- Waterproof Softwares phpCodeBeautifier is pretty handy for tidying up that incredibly messy code you’ve just inherited.
- My choice of (nearly) free windows text editor goes to Edit+, which is pretty neat for all sorts of code stuff – it has regex support too which is neat. For the most part I use the Zend Development Environment though.
- Savant is one of the most sensible PHP templating systems availiable – as it uses PHP as a templating language, instead of some ugly pseudo code PoS. Its pretty lightweight, and distributed as a PEAR package. It’s even being reworked for PHP5 now too.
- My final PHP tool is written in Python. Trac is just about the best issue tracking/wiki/project management/repository browsing tool availiable. If you havent moved to Subversion yet – then Horde’s Chora project is an acceptable repository browser, but doesn’t have half the neat stuff trac has.
Hope these tools help you as much as they have helped me 