General developer forum

Tim Hunt has produce some excellent documention on using Eclipse with PHP and Moodle. I used to use jEdit which has a PHP extension - bit easier to pick up but not as good in my opinion. There are also plenty of specialised PHP IDEs out there.   

Tim Hunt recently added some really good documentation on setting up Eclipse for developing Moodle code. Unfortunately Eclipse runs too slow on my computer. I don't know how it compares to Dreamweaver though.

I can't tell about the other PHP IDE's as it seems most people are using editors. Make sure you at least have support for tags functionality as that will make it easier to lookup Moodle function definitions.

jEdit is free and has support for tags.

Vim is very fast, very powerfull but has a steep learning curve. Nice thing about vim is also that it is available on almost every server.

And then of course (if you need your editor to have a psychiatrist built-in ) there is Emacs. Seriously I don't know which one is best. I think it's just a matter of personal taste. To me learning to use Vim's different editing modes is easier than having to type a lot of different key combinations.

I use Dreamweaver when on a PC and it works fine. My only complaint is that you can't tell it to use tabs instead of spaces and it doesn't provide a way to jump quickly to any functions defined in the file. (All decent editors provide a pull-down list which automatically lists all such elements.)

Mostly I use Mac and I use BBEdit, which is marvellous.

I also use vi or vim for command-line editing which is really handy when all you have is an SSH command line.

I'm going through the same drill Paul.  Using Dreamweaver (mx2004) because I have it installed, I agree it works better than I expected but it's not particularly php aware so it's more like an editor than an IDE. 

I've done the 30 day demo of Zend Studio and will most likely buy it (well, my boss will) but I thought I'd try out some other options first.  It does nice code completion and self documentation as long as you follow certain standards.  It recognizes require_once syntax and includes user functions in code completion and quick help.  It doesn't handle large files as well as I wish it did, and I sure wish it could understand embedded language better.  It does nice code highlighting but only for the extension of the file you're working with.  If the extension is .js it 'knows' javascript, but if it's .php it completely forgets that it knows javascript.  Oh well!

I've ruled out Maguma Studio (free version) because another developer I work with is using it and constantly complains about it. He gives it about 6/10.

Haven't had a chance to try others yet but I have a list of 4 or so to work through.  I like Zend enough that I may just get it.  I wish it were a bit cheaper though...

I also use Dreamweaver (I'm stuck on Windows at work ) for project style functionality.

EditPlus is also recommended for quick edits (easier than notepad - has code highlighting etc.)

Both non-free unfortunately.

Hi Paul,

Saw this post and had to represent my most favorite application: TextMate.  This is by far the most powerful yet simplest editor I have ever ran across.  I used to use Dreamweaver but it drove me insane by not allowing me enough control while editing and it is bloated with useless features when one is only editing in code view.  TextMate sometimes reminds me of Photoshop in that you can use the application for months or years and then discover some new and powerful feature that you have never used before.

TextMate is for Mac OS X only, but I think it is impossible to beat.

Another good application is CocoaMySQL.  It is a GUI for MySQL and it is Mac only as well.

Cheers,
Mark

ok - here's one from left field - We're another MS shop, so guess what most of our tools are!

I'm using an extension called Vs.PHP with Visual Studio 2005

seems to work ok.



Dan

Maguma open studio is pretty neat too. But I use vim 99.9999% of the time.

I use an editor called CPad for coding. It has bracket matching and it allows you to run diffs on two files. But one of my favorite tools is something called AM-Code Search. It allows you to search any file type for strings of code within that file. Very useful when you are looking up a particular string in Moodle and want to know where it occurs, since the Windows search function can't handle php files but AM Code Search can.

There is a very wide scale of development environments in use, as noted from the responses. Lot of overlapping signals start to sound like noice at some point Martin D. himself uses "vim" (or "gVim") in combination with utility tools like "grep", "ctags" and revision control (CVS, maybe TortoiseCVS for a client).

If you want a full IDE, Eclipse might be the one to go with. Zend Studio is another one candidate, but it's not free. But if you're looking for drag'n'drop data grids, visual form building tools and similar features that sometimes describe the "state of the art IDEs", then I don't think there is one that you can use in Moodle development. The web forms are usually generated by a big combination of functions and the database queries are done with Moodle library calls. Dreamweaver in the code view seems to work ok, apart from the lack of "spaces for tabs" support.

I've used PHPEdit in the past, but due to stability problems I switched to gVim. Basically my IDE, in a wide sense, is a file explorer (xplorer2), gVim, Firefox with a lot of extensions like WebDeveloper, MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser, Subversion with TortoiseSVN, grep and some shell scripts (both in Windows and Linux).

I have not even begun to look at development of Moodle or php yet but have built up a tool box of programs that look useful for when i do.

there is a free program out there call php designer that looks as though it will do the job you want.

 

ian