Best development environment for C5 & PHP
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I'm looking for input for fav dev environments for C5 specifically and PHP in general.
If you just work in a text editor -- well, that just doesn't work for us mere mortals.
I'm trying to understand the general logic throughout the C5 system and specifically in some add-ons for customization. Trying to set up an environment where I can step through the code to better understand it, while tracing vars, etc.
Considering Eclipse PDT or possibly going commercial with Coda or Zend Studio. Looks like Coda doesn't really offer anything that I don't already have with Dreamweaver (code completion, code beautifying, syntax checking). Zend might be overkill or very similar to Eclipse...
Thoughts?
If you just work in a text editor -- well, that just doesn't work for us mere mortals.
I'm trying to understand the general logic throughout the C5 system and specifically in some add-ons for customization. Trying to set up an environment where I can step through the code to better understand it, while tracing vars, etc.
Considering Eclipse PDT or possibly going commercial with Coda or Zend Studio. Looks like Coda doesn't really offer anything that I don't already have with Dreamweaver (code completion, code beautifying, syntax checking). Zend might be overkill or very similar to Eclipse...
Thoughts?
I suggest NetBeans IDE
I used to use Eclipse in the past for general PHP work- it has/had some cool validation plugins and I know you get can a debugger working (never got that working myself though).
The thing is, with developing/debugging Concrete5, I find that most of the time I don't need to step through code - sitewide text searches tend to track down things quickly. Most things in concrete5 follow a decent MVC pattern. For debugging, a quick print_r() exposes arrays and objects quickly and easily.
I say this from the perpective of someone who has done a lot of customisation of the ecommerce plugin, so this is my approach, but each to their own.
I'm a big fan of Coda. The site management and ftp side of things is great. It has basic code completion (function names, but not anything fancier than that), but I have a few plugins for Coda that do things like tidy php and html. Coda 2 is not far away and it should have quite a few new features.
The direct competitor to Code would be Espresso (http://macrabbit.com/espresso/). A very similar editor, but it's more recently updated. I prefer the site management of Coda, but that might have improved with the latest versions of Espresso.
Now integrated with Espresso is CSSEdit. I've got the stand alone version of this and it's great. If CSS is something you struggle with, I'd check this out.
Dreamweaver is just too big and slow in my opinion. Same with Eclipse to be honest.
One thing I'll mention is a tool I use on an hourly basis - the Aardvark bookmarklet for Chrome/Firefox (and Safari I think) -http://karmatics.com/aardvark/
It's a quick way to check html output, ids, classnames, etc.
The thing is, with developing/debugging Concrete5, I find that most of the time I don't need to step through code - sitewide text searches tend to track down things quickly. Most things in concrete5 follow a decent MVC pattern. For debugging, a quick print_r() exposes arrays and objects quickly and easily.
I say this from the perpective of someone who has done a lot of customisation of the ecommerce plugin, so this is my approach, but each to their own.
I'm a big fan of Coda. The site management and ftp side of things is great. It has basic code completion (function names, but not anything fancier than that), but I have a few plugins for Coda that do things like tidy php and html. Coda 2 is not far away and it should have quite a few new features.
The direct competitor to Code would be Espresso (http://macrabbit.com/espresso/). A very similar editor, but it's more recently updated. I prefer the site management of Coda, but that might have improved with the latest versions of Espresso.
Now integrated with Espresso is CSSEdit. I've got the stand alone version of this and it's great. If CSS is something you struggle with, I'd check this out.
Dreamweaver is just too big and slow in my opinion. Same with Eclipse to be honest.
One thing I'll mention is a tool I use on an hourly basis - the Aardvark bookmarklet for Chrome/Firefox (and Safari I think) -http://karmatics.com/aardvark/
It's a quick way to check html output, ids, classnames, etc.
try phpstorm or zend ide
