CodeLobster PHP Edition 3.8.1 is the latest version of a free portable Windows IDE. For those working with content management its PRO version has CMS-specific plug-ins and extra features.

The free CodeLobster PHP Edition has facilities to take a lot of the tedium and difficulty out of creating PHP programs - such as autocomplete for PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and even SQL, a PHP debugger, color-coded highlighting, and context and dynamic help files.

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Its HTML/CSS code inspector helps locate code and styles anywhere in your web page. Debugging functions include Step Into and Step Over, and you can watch user variables, local variables, and the Call Stack as you step through the program.

Additional features, including code folding (collapsing), a portability option, highlighting of paired tags and attributes, tooltips that display the values of variables marked with your mouse cursor, class view, and a project manager.

The Professional version ($99.95) of  includes plug-ins for the Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal CMS environments and for  the CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Facebook, Symfony, Smarty, and Yii frameworks. It also has support for the JQuery JavaScript library; and a SQL Manager. If you use one of these frameworks then the facilities added are well worth the upgrade. For example, in most you get Intellisense prompting for objects and variables that are standard in the system Joomla!'s JFactory class for example. You also get the ability to auto generate new components where appropriate - Joomla! modules, components and templates for example.

It all goes to emphasize  that PHP development is no longer a single entity but really does depend on what framework you are using and tools that help with these sub-ecologies of the bigger PHP ecology are to be welcomed.

More information:

CodeLobster.com

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Ten minutes to PHP