OKCOOL

It’s all a bit musical around here at the moment with our work on the Music Wall – in fact, I’m starting to think I might be in a cheap production of West Side Story. So, as a change of topic, I thought I would do a quick review of a PHP IDE that has made my life far more enjoyable of late. Introducing, phpDesigner :

This is by no means a conclusive review as I’m still finding new things I wasn’t previously aware of, but here are my thoughts…

Things I like

• Access to Help – although it’s a minor thing, it’s really quick to get to the PHP manual. This is great for someone switching from another language that isn’t quite familiar with function names and other facets of PHP.
• Code complete – they’ve done an excellent job on this given that it’s PHP and all file based. It seems to discover variables I really wouldn’t have expected it to.
• Syntax highlighting – it’s got it just right. The fact it also highlights variables in strings is great.
• Different interface designs – you can choose from a selection of interface designs. I can almost pretend I’m not in XP!
• SVN integration – this really is great, especially as the plugin I had for Visual Studio had more bugs than a bug breeding farm (if such a thing exists?)!
• To do/bug management – it’s really easy to insert to-do and bug items and there’s a nice little manager window for them.
• It’s fast – I have a slightly overloaded Lenovo laptop at the moment and even
• It’s very stable & bug free – it hasn’t, as yet, crashed once on me.
• The support has been fantastic, I’ve asked a series of really stupid questions and had answers within minutes.
• Price – it’s just right based on the more expensive competition and the fact that there are a number of free alternatives.

Things I’m not so keen on

I’m going to be a bit careful about what I say here because a lot of the functionality that was annoying me or I thought was missing wasn’t a problem after I had emailed support (thanks Michael).

• FTP – it’s very basic and is a bit of a fiddle to be useful. It’s actually just easier to keep an FTP client open and switch between the two. I can however, see their dilemma as I am sure they’ve been previously flooded with requests for this functionality. You can however kick open a copy of FileZilla which is great because it’s the FTP client I use.

• Settings – there are a lot, and some of them are set wrong for my taste initially and aren’t perhaps in the most logical of places. However, perhaps it’s me that’s not logical! Most of my issues with auto complete functionality were solved once I’d found the correct settings.

My suggestions

• Better Docking windows – as a regular Visual Studio user I’m normally a bit spoilt in this department. phpDesigner could really do with the option to separate some of the most important windows such as project view and code explorer and allow me to pin them and unpin them (so they hide away neatly when not in use).

• Centralised Refactoring – I’m still trying to get my head around the best approach for refactoring PHP. It’s not really the fault of the ide, rather the fact that refactoring is difficult with any scripting language. However, it would be nice if there was a Refactoring menu under the right click so you could easily rename variables, switch variables to constants etc.

In Summary

My transition from .NET to PHP has been joyful (when are you gonna sort your shit out Microsoft?), a lot of this is down to phpDesigner. For what I assume is a small software company, MP Software have done an amazing job. This editor almost makes me want to stay with a PC, even if I do feel slightly out numbered by all of the Macies.

Check out http://www.mpsoftware.dk/ to download a trial.

Hopefully the guys at MP Software will comment on anything I’ve said that might be wrong or dillusional ;)