Sitepoint asks for your favourite PHP IDE – take part!

Bruno Skvorc ask for your favourite PHP IDE in this new article on Sitepoint. If you use one, then take part, it’s important to encourage others to use a proper IDE rather than fiddling around with text editors. And you can also win licences and ebooks.

If you don’t use an IDE…

… then start today. Seriously. There’s absolutly no logical reason to fiddle around with a text editor. For beginners and your first steps in PHP, sure, then a simple text editor is totally okay, but if you want to write real applications and / or are earning your money with development, then use the most advanced tools available. An IDE will improve your workflow dramatically, reduce your time on the command line massivly and add a lot of code quality to your project. Be open minded and try it out, and let yourself guide by YouTube tutorials if you don’t know where to start.

But I don’t want to pay for it !

Seriously, get rid of this “I want everything for free” bullshit. There’s a lot of work behind good stuff, and it’s okay to pay for it if you make money by using these tools. If you don’t earn money with your development (because you are doing it for fun or non-profit or because you are in your early developer years) then you can download some excellent FREE (!) IDEs.

• Netbeans is probably the most professional one here, it’s free and open-source (and financed by Oracle btw).
• CodeLobster is small and quick, a good choice for beginners. There’s a free version, but you can buy upgrades to add more (professional) features, totally worth it.
• PHPStorm is – in my opinion – by far the best PHP IDE available. It’s a commercial tool, but you can get free (!) licences for good open-source projects.
• Aptana is quite unknown, but does the job! The code completion is not as advanced as in other IDEs.

If you earn money with your development …

… which means that you are some kind of professional, then work like a professional and use the best tools available. As developers are usually paid quite good around the globe, it’s totally okay to buy the best tools you can get and pay the creators of great tools that make you earn money. The price spent for the IDE(s) is refinanced within weeks (!), as IDEs increase your workflow dramatically and lift your development on a much higher level. When a tool helps you, then give something back. Buy it. Or if it’s free, then donate or add something useful to the project.

• PHPStorm, my clear winner. below $100 for a personal licence, below $200 for a commercial licence. Extremely clean, easy to learn, fully featured and always on the cutting edge of PHP development. The integration of git is awesome, features like Vagrant, Composer, local and remote debugging, deployments, FTP, ssh, etc. make PHPStorm indispensable.
• for companies working with the Zend 1/2 framework Zend Studio is the choice. $200 for a one-year-licence.
• special, because not a real IDE, but a very very good text editor with a lot of professional IDE features inside (and others can be added via plugins): Sublime. If your development is mainly frontend-driven and you don’t need hardcore debugging, Vagrant etc. then Sublime is real alternative. $70. Clearly made by people with a proper understanding of interface design and usability. Version 3 is coming out.
• RapidPHP is like a smaller version of PHPStorm, haven’t tried the latest version, but definitly not bad. $40

Note: There are NO affiliate links etc. in this post and this is just my personal opinion, not sponsored or anything else.