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What's a good software for PHP editing?
- Thread starter monoxera
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There's more HTML / PHP editors than there are flavours of ice-cream.
What are you looking for in an editor ?
full development environment ? low-cost ? free ?
tabbed windows ?
syntax highlighting ?
variable name auto-complete ?
built-in FTP ?
built-in document version history ?
3 simple editors are: TextMate, BBEdit, and Komodo Edit.
What are you looking for in an editor ?
full development environment ? low-cost ? free ?
tabbed windows ?
syntax highlighting ?
variable name auto-complete ?
built-in FTP ?
built-in document version history ?
3 simple editors are: TextMate, BBEdit, and Komodo Edit.
I use BBEdit. I love it and would never change.
But Textwrangler which is free is perfectly fine as well, it's a lighted version of BBEdit. Although you don't have a syntax reference in it.
But Textwrangler which is free is perfectly fine as well, it's a lighted version of BBEdit. Although you don't have a syntax reference in it.
Moved the thread to the Web development forum, where you might find more people with PHP experience... 
Myself, I use Coda on a daily basis (for on-line editing), with the free TextWrangler as my second choice (and for the odd off-line editing).
Also, check out Taco HTML, which I used a bit back when it was free, that features a pretty neat live preview of PHP code. There should be a trial available.
Also, take a look at the stickies here in the Web forum, there's plenty of recommendations for a wide range og editors, and you might find something better suited for your needs.
Myself, I use Coda on a daily basis (for on-line editing), with the free TextWrangler as my second choice (and for the odd off-line editing).
Also, check out Taco HTML, which I used a bit back when it was free, that features a pretty neat live preview of PHP code. There should be a trial available.
Also, take a look at the stickies here in the Web forum, there's plenty of recommendations for a wide range og editors, and you might find something better suited for your needs.
Moved the thread to the Web development forum, where you might find more people with PHP experience...
Myself, I use Coda on a daily basis (for on-line editing), with the free TextWrangler as my second choice (and for the odd off-line editing).
Also, check out Taco HTML, which I used a bit back when it was free, that features a pretty neat live preview of PHP code. There should be a trial available.
Also, take a look at the stickies here in the Web forum, there's plenty of recommendations for a wide range og editors, and you might find something better suited for your needs.
Thanks for moving. I know I tried searching but there were TOO many threads (you knwo what i Mean
But yea, I wanted the latest "news" on what's the best software.
about that taco HTML... it shows you a LIVE preview of the website if you change 1 little thing to a code?
Thanks to all other users as well, will give BBEDIT a try as soon as my mac is repaired from apple store
Unless I am misunderstanding you, remember PHP is parsed server side when the web page is executed. It's not like updating an image using preview in a graphic editor. The way most developers work is they build a private sandbox to develop the site locally, i.e. right on your Mac using a product like MAMP which creates a MySQL/Apache/PHP environment. You'll use whatever development software you wish and browse to your sandbox site and test pages (i.e. PHP) locally on your own Mac or LAN. When you got it just right, publish to a webhost on the Internet, that's your production environment.
The WYSIWYG editor will only show you layout and images, template stuff.
Source view is for PHP coding and HTML, XML, whatever.
The browser will show you the final parsed view (PHP has executed, page is rendered and output to browser).
The sandbox is a "live preview" if you follow. Please let me know if I'm off base here.
-jim
BBEdit is my main editor. There's a number of people who also like TextMate, which is in the same league as BBEdit. Lately, I've been trying out Aptana, which gives you a IDE experience and code completion for PHP and other languages. I've had some issues with it though, like sluggishness, and I couldn't get the live preview to work with a virtual host setup. Being free though, makes it worth checking out. I think it has a lot of promise, though I still stick with BBEdit for everything.
You referring to the Eclipse PDT plugin in Aptana as to live preview? If so, it has a built in PHP interpreter but it's not the same as a hosted environment, I'd not trust it. Am I wrong to think so?
TextMate is my favorite... but costs $$$. (And its priced in GBP so as the USD declines, TextMate gets more expensive. I'm glad I bought it a long time ago
)I have the standalone Aptana, not the plugin version for Eclipse as I use NetBeans rather than Eclipse. The live preview worked for localhost stuff, but for my virtual hosts the settings didn't let me configure things enough for the preview to work properly. Not a huge deal as I can just have MAMP running and view things in Firefox like I normally do.
PHP Editor
The one i keep coming back to is Komodo.
Have used it for a while now, as well as others (aptana, eclipse, zend studio, dreamweaver etc), but Komodo still my favorite IDE.
I couple it with smultron for my quick updates where he IDE isnt needed.
The one i keep coming back to is Komodo.
Have used it for a while now, as well as others (aptana, eclipse, zend studio, dreamweaver etc), but Komodo still my favorite IDE.
I couple it with smultron for my quick updates where he IDE isnt needed.
Yes, thank for you for informative post.
I do use MAMP and edit it locally then publish it to my actual FTP.
But the thing is, does Taco HTML show LIVE preview of it while I'm editing? Say, I edit a text, then will it show in the live preview portion, what I changed?
I know sandbox is "live preview", but it's such a hassle to check up on what parts I missed since I'm fairly new to PHP and plus, firefox keeps cache of stuff so sometimes I have to reload like 10 times before I see the changes.
Will look at Web Developer Add-On ^_^
Bought both a Textmate and Coda license. I absolutely love Coda. I guess we are all narrowing it down to:
Textmate, BBEdit, and Coda.
Spend the cash, or download the trial. They are all worth it.
Textmate, BBEdit, and Coda.
Spend the cash, or download the trial. They are all worth it.
As to Firefox caching pages, always refresh using the F5 key, simple as that. Same for MSIE, btw.
I want to clarify that WYSIWYG mode is of course live preview for HTML, but not usually for server side intepretation of PHP source. Eclipse and other tools really are tiny sandboxes, i.e. PHP running inside a Java environment locally on your machine spawned by the IDE. They interpret code okay until you start getting into complex PHP development where server side system calls and API development because nothing can replace the real server, and no two servers are exactly the same environment. So I don't put much faith in them at present, and prefer local sandboxing. On a Mac it's real close to a majority of the production webhosts out there because Mac is Debian which is Linux. Most dedicated hosts, VPS use some form of *nix or Solaris or BSD - the folks who work with IIS and MSSQL or Microsoft whatever.net have their own sandbox worlds, too, in my opinion.
-jim
I want to clarify that WYSIWYG mode is of course live preview for HTML, but not usually for server side intepretation of PHP source. Eclipse and other tools really are tiny sandboxes, i.e. PHP running inside a Java environment locally on your machine spawned by the IDE. They interpret code okay until you start getting into complex PHP development where server side system calls and API development because nothing can replace the real server, and no two servers are exactly the same environment. So I don't put much faith in them at present, and prefer local sandboxing. On a Mac it's real close to a majority of the production webhosts out there because Mac is Debian which is Linux. Most dedicated hosts, VPS use some form of *nix or Solaris or BSD - the folks who work with IIS and MSSQL or Microsoft whatever.net have their own sandbox worlds, too, in my opinion.
-jim
I think this live-preview functionality is a gadget. Nothing better than to preview in Firefox with the web-developer plugin installed. You can do this on a sandbox, thanks to cyberduck that can download and edit the file with an external editor.
MacOS X is based on BSD -- Unix -- actually.
But your point is true. I develop on my Macbook using all the same programs that we run on RedHat and Debian Linux in our production environments: Apache, PHP, MySQL.
In fact, Snow Leopard includes PHP 5.3, which was quite a surprise!
You have to pay an extra $2k to get PHP 5.2 on a RedHat server, and 5.3 isn't available at all.
Anyway, I'm getting off topic. If you want to do real development, you need a real environment. Running it locally is smart because its fast (no network latency) and you can build web apps even when you're not online. I can do work on the train, plane, starbucks, etc.
Oops, you're right - OS X is based on Mach, developed as a replacement for the kernel for BSD as you correctly noted. Thank you for mentioning that.
Seems like most of us agree live preview is good for basic HTML layout and design in localhost, but really FF with the Dev tools (and remember to press F5 to avoid cache issues when needed) is a pretty popular approach. I found this thread very informative and interesting so far.
Side notes about Red Hat/PHP5.3 -- yes, as an RPM via the RHN you're correct. I installed the latest PHP5 the old fashioned way on our RHEL5 - downloaded the source from php.net and compiled manually using make/install. For those who want PHP5 via simplified YUM installs to manage updates, one can also get PHP 5.3 RPM's from the Remi test repository. There might be a few other repositories as well, if one Google searches. The remi test repository RPM is very stable based on feedback I've seen, but of course it's not technically a production release.
-jim
Seems like most of us agree live preview is good for basic HTML layout and design in localhost, but really FF with the Dev tools (and remember to press F5 to avoid cache issues when needed) is a pretty popular approach. I found this thread very informative and interesting so far.
Side notes about Red Hat/PHP5.3 -- yes, as an RPM via the RHN you're correct. I installed the latest PHP5 the old fashioned way on our RHEL5 - downloaded the source from php.net and compiled manually using make/install. For those who want PHP5 via simplified YUM installs to manage updates, one can also get PHP 5.3 RPM's from the Remi test repository. There might be a few other repositories as well, if one Google searches. The remi test repository RPM is very stable based on feedback I've seen, but of course it's not technically a production release.
-jim