myEburg.net

One of the first problems every php developer have is to make good choice between one or other develop environment.

You can get one of the editors you already have available from your operating system, like vim, mcedit, gedit, all them know about syntax highlighting, and you don't need any work to get it work.
Mostly this solution  is very good, you can quickly edit your files even on server side. But if you start coding your project with in more serious  way, you have more needs than just edit file and get it highlighted.

I was using big count of different editors and development environments : screem, bluefish, gphpedit, cssed.
All this applications are very nice done, they all are very helpful for making HTML and CSS works, but it wasn't what i was really expected for work with PHP. Long time i even used anjuta, which is created mostly for C/C++ development.
There are another applications made only for PHP witch even allows you to debug server scripts remotly like: maguma studio and zend studio. But they mostly costs something and don't made me happy.
If i pay something i expect that this application can provide me with some class browsing  and code completion even if i do include file with this class in to the script and don't tell how file is called directly but take it from the variable.
After some time i really have one optimal solution found for me - that is using  eclipse platform and some of the plug-ins for it.

There are two projects for eclipse to allow PHP scripts development - phpeclipse and Truestudio IDE. There are some reasons why i like last one more.

So what you need to start php coding - download 3.1.1 (actually current) version of Eclipse Runtime Binary Platform (linux_gtk_x86). And take this plag-ins for it:

1. trustudio-foundation-1.0.1a.zip
2. trustudio-php-1.0.1a.zip
3. trustudio-php_binaries-1.0.1a-linux-x86.zip

If you have different platform architecture you need another files, which are placed here: http://builds.xored.com/builds/S-1.0.1a-200509131848/

Just extract this files to your early extracted eclipse folder and you can start your work already. After first run you need to setup path to your binary php and his ini file.

Thats not all. There are some other very useful and needed plug-ins which you may will have install.
First two are for WebDAV or FTP support and  access to SVN repositories.
First plug-in you can install directly from eclipse update site and second after adding this update site in the same place: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update

Another plug-in which is good to have for web-development is a good css editor. It can be found here: csseditor.sourceforge.net
You need atleast 0.0.4 version if you will get it work with eclipse-3.1

Also you can need a good html and xml editor, but i dont found today any which would work for me. If you have any idea about that, please just drop me a comment.