Joomla development environment, toolchain and workflow

Question

I have the tas to setup, design (devlop a Template), configure (menus, users, plugins etc.), provide the acutal content and administer/maintain a Joomla based website.

What tools, IDEs etc. do you use in your development environment. Of course I would like to do as much of the development work as possible offline without the web frontend. How does this work? I would like to have an comfortable IDE for all the JavaScript, PHP and HTML stuff. I would like to see the results and debug live and immediatetly and then later upload the changes to the server. Is that how you work? A little bit of WYSIWYG for the design work of course would be great too. If the tools are good they do not have necessarily to be free and may cost money :)

Maybe ther is a tutorial ala "Setting up your development environment for joomla" that also focuses on the tools. Not just installing WAMP.

Answer 1

For creating a template - NVU with NVU Joomla Template Builder plugin, or DreamWeaver with plugin if you can afford, for configuration and content management Joomla itself, phpMyAdmin for database management might be useful. As for the IDE, I've used Aptana studio, though I haven't done much development. Those are the tool I've used and found them sufficient.

Answer 2

You might be interested in this brand new template designer software called Artisteer.

Answer 3

I suggest to try free PHP IDE Codelobster PHP Edition with special Joomla plugin, that has autocomplete, context help abilities and internal Editor for Themes.