PHP development environment best practices

Question

There are so many options when it comes to PHP development environments and you have to piece it all together yourself.

I'm wondering if someone has come up with what they think is the ideal setup that gets out of your way and lets you develop.

Right now I use vim and svn from the command-line. I write scripts to manage builds but I'm thinking about looking into Phing.

I love vim but I'm seriously thinking of trying Eclipse with the PHP plugin because I imagine it makes common SVN options a bit easier (moving files around in a project).

Something to support continuous integration on the database would be a major plus!

UPDATE: Just wanted to stress that previous line up there. I realize some frameworks will help with this, but I don't use a framework. Is there some simple module out there (included in the IDE or not) that will let me easily tie my database schemas/data to a subversion revision, letting me rollback and forward, tag, branch, etc?

Any comments on things beyond the editor? For example: Builds, managing staging/production/development environments, automated testing and building upon SVN commit, etc. Ideally we can make this post a "Go to Whoah" for setting up a professional PHP team development environment.

Answer 1

I recommend to use a complete featured IDE like the PDT (the eclipse PHP project), it gives you: debugging (using Xdebug or ZendDebugger)

SVN/CVS very convinient integration

DB integration (the DTP plugin)

and much more, based on features of the PDT and eclipse plugins

if you have some money to spent, I think the Zend Studio For eclipse worth it. It gives you better debugging, PHPUnit integration, ZendFramewrok support, Refactoring and remote system support (ftp, ssh etc.)

Answer 2

I too love vim and used to develop using the same environment as you. These days though I find Eclipse PDT, with Subclipse for SVN integration, to be invaluable. XDebug is great too - no more var_dump();exit; for debugging.

One of the best plugins for a vim fan moving to Eclipse: viPlugin. Well worth the token licence fee to have vi key bindings in Eclipse.

Answer 3

I'm giving Netbeans 6.5 PHP bundle a try and liking it very much. I find debugging in it is less clunky than in Eclipse PDT.

Answer 4

If you are working from the command line, using Git's SVN module eases most of the SVN pain - it handles deletes and moves automagically.

The GUI front ends (kgit or qgit) provide a very intuitive history browser.

Answer 5

I personally like the way that AptanaStudio has pre-packaged all the great Eclipse modules you need to have a very smooth PHP development environment