I'm making a small php website. I find it useful to prototype or layout the pages in a WYSIWYG web page editor.
I'd like to get suggestions on WYSIWIG web page editors that work well in a php development pipeline. Please share your favorites and describe why you like them.
The only one I've used is Dreamweaver, can't say I liked it that much as the preview it displays wasn't how it actually looked in a browser.
Nvu is supposed to be quite good though.
I prefer just editing in an IDE then viewing in a real browser.
Unfortunately, the best one I've used as far as WYSIWYG is Dreamweaver, and I don't like it that much either, but it is a standard part of the toolset in many web shops, and you just get used to it.
I currently use Aptana for that sort of prototyping, which is not really WYSIWYG, but has a great preview function, and I don't end up having to go back through crappy WYSIWYG generated markup and cleaning it up later.
I have never used the php part of Aptana (don't do much php), but have friends who seem to like it. The JS stuff is brilliant, and the CSS editor pretty good too.
If you want to use a WYSIWYG editor, I would suggest using it just to create the initial layout. Once you've started adding PHP to the page, it will be impossible for an editor to accurately show what the page looks like. So at that point, you should start editing it by hand, in a text editor.
You can simplify this if you use some sort of template system. This could be a real template engine like Smarty, but it doesn't need to be. The idea is simply to keep as much PHP out of the HTML file as possible, other than printing data and control statements (loops and such). Then include the file from the main script, which does all the heavy lifting. This way, if your design changes, it will be easier to create a new template using your WYSIWYG editor.
I like Dreamweaver MX (and later) because it offers the code-completion of plain-text utilities that focus on hand-coding with the WYSIWYG capabilities you may desire to quickly code pages. I also just happen to like its HTML compatibility checks against IE, Netscape etc.
I prefer BBEdit for developing anything web, but you could try out phpDesigner 2008: http://www.mpsoftware.dk/phpdesigner.php (for PC)
I find it faster to type everything (with a text editor that supports code-completion) then test it on the browser rather than using WYSIWYG, stumbling into a problem ("hm, why does it look different ?") and cleaning up the source code later.
Of course, if you are somewhat new to HTML / CSS it might be a good choice to stick to WYSIWYG for a while.
Personally, I find that Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 is sufficient for both.
well if you'd ask me dreamweaver is still the best wywsiwyg out there currently after tapping out the features that MS Frontpage had (which i have used before it)
although today im not really using any WYSIWYG editors anymore as i do not trust them anymore to give clean markup... what im using right now is notepad++ its free and open source and is much like unix's notepad, but hey its not wysiwyg anymore just a plain text editor
Dreamweaver is probably the best. Unfortunately there's no open source alternative (that I know) that compares to DW. I've tried Kompozer (Nvu) before and it's pretty lightweight and it does the job. It is worth a try.
Like many web developers, I long ago stopped using WYSIWYG editors simply because none of them was good enough - and I wouldn't trust any of them (except possibly DreamWeaver, I'm not sure) to preserve PHP.
But lately I have found myself more willing to use existing software. I've delivered several corporate sites based on WordPress, which gives clients a WYSiWYG editor for their pages while still giving me the freedom to write the code.
TinyMCE comes close as a free lightweight dreamweaver alternative which contructs valid XHTML code. The text engine is running at netEditr.com. You can also sketchup some PHP code using the code editor there, just select PHP in the syntax for syntax coloring.