Developers Corner: Cool Dev Tools – PHP Storm IDE

Developers Corner

I’ve been a PHP geek for years, and by years I mean over ten years which makes me feel pretty darn old. I started out writing all of my code in good old Notepad and then moved onto emacs during my Linux days, then onto BBEdit and now I’ve recently discovered an IDE just for PHP that is making my life even easier.

Text editors are great but using an IDE has some major benefits that save you time as a developer. The main reason I’ve made the move to PHP Storm is because of it’s solid integration with the Magento eCommerce platform that I now work with all day every day. Along with code completion and PHPDoc support PHP Storm also has enhanced Framework support so whether you use Zend, Yii, Symphony2 or any other popular framework you’ll be in good shape.

PHP Complete Suggestions

Above you can see an example of suggested code completion based on PHPDoc. The debug features are what really won me over since in reality 99% of coding is debugging so a good debug tool can make a huge difference.

PHP Debug

You can see a full list of PHP Storm features here and if you’d like to dig a little deeper you can read a more in-depth review of PHP Storm on PHPMaster.com.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton