The changes to PhpStorm 8 have been designed to make it easier to use emerging web technologies that include both back-end and front-end development. The designers say it has ‘even deeper code understanding’ with better handling of mixed language editing, improved static code analysis, and full support for PHP 5.6.

Other improvements mean you can now use Laravel Blade templates. Behat support is also integrated so you can use behavior-driven development. WordPress support has been improved, and support has been added for a number of web technologies including spy-js, Grunt, gulp.js, and Bower.

Alexey Gopachenko, PhpStorm project lead said in a statement:

"We constantly rethink and refine all aspects of the IDE and integrate the best tools, to always be there for you as you develop—in both senses of the word.”

In terms of PHP language support, alongside the full support for PHP 5.6, the developers have added new intentions and inspections, enhanced formatting, type inference, and other coding assistance features. Support has been added for multiple carets and selections, so you can work with multiple cursors in one file simultaneously. Smart autocompletion and live templates work with multiple carets and selections as well.

Maarten Balliauw summarizes the new features of the IDE in this short video:

The mixed language editing has been completely rewritten. In a blog post about the reworked feature, Balliauw pointed out that in many codebases, small islands of different programming languages are being used in code, for example chunks of JavaScript written in a PHP string, or portions of HTML in a JavaScript variable, or database queries inside a string. He gave the example of:

“generating an HTML e-mail body in which we’re using several PHP variables and so forth. PhpStorm recognizes that the string holds HTML mixed with PHP and provides syntax highlighting, code completion and navigation. Yes, all inside a string.”

The language of some snippets will automatically be recognized by PhpStorm, others you’ll have to identify. Once the IDE knows the language injected, you can use the Edit Fragment intention to open up a separate editor in which you can edit the language fragment. This means you can focus on the contents of the string instead of things like escaping. Language injections work on any type of string: regular strings, concatenated strings, HEREDOC, and so on. If a string contains a code fragment that does not belong to the language being edited, PhpStorm will simply gray it out so its original value is always preserved.

Other improvements derive from the underlying IntelliJ Platform, including the ability to work with a single file without creating a project, a bundled Scratch plugin, and EditorConfig support.

A free 30-day evaluation version is available to allow you to try before you subscribe and PHPStorm is free for students and teachers, open source projects and user groups.

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