Design By Tim

I’ve been asked on several occasions to spill the beans on my development environment. Sadly, it’s probably not the easiest setup - but it works for my stubborn mind.

• I use PHP Eclipse, ScITE, and PsPad for editing (I’m sorry Dreamweaver but you have sadly lost the battle)
• I love CuteFTP (it’s the cuteness obviously)
• XAMPP on Vista (don’t get me started - this will have to be another post)
• Subversion - because everyone isn’t perfect
• Firefox - if you need the link… come on
• And a horde of other products and since I’m not being sponsored by any of them then you’re on your own.

As you can probably tell by the majority of my posts I primarily develop in PHP (and proudly support Code Igniter). PHP has many of features built-in, along with often-cited criticism, and one I happen to agree with, is the inconsistent naming of functions. Thankfully, PHP.net has excellent documentation, including many user-contributed notes, examples and other comments. The key is to quickly access this documentation, which I find is invaluable to my productivity.

One tool that helps me is the DevBoi Firefox extension. Once installed, you will also want to install the PHP addon package. You can then access DevBoi either from the Tools menu, or press Ctrl+F9 (Linux/Windows). This will load DevBoi in the sidebar of the browser, and if the PHP package isn’t already selected, do so from the dropdown list. This will present you with an exhaustive, alphabetically sorted list of all the PHP functions. Double click on one to bring up that function’s documentation in the current browser tab window. Some hints: Ctrl+Click on the function will open it in a new tab, pressing any character will bring up the list of function names at that point in the list (b => base64_decode()). There are probably some other tricks that I’m missing—read the documentation. Bonus: Along with quick access to the PHP function reference, DevBoi is bundled with HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0, CSS 2.1, Javascript 1.3 and DOM 2. Other addon packages include Ruby on Rails, XUL and there are more on the way.

Another great tip for quickly accessing the PHP documentation is to create a Firefox Quick Search bookmark and assign it to a keyword. The one I set-up is utter simplicity:

Name:        PHP

Location:    http://www.php.net/%s

Keyword:     php

Description: Search PHP.net

If you prefer something printed and handy on your desk, have a look at I Love Jack Daniel’s PHP Cheat Sheet, available in both PNG and PDF formats. There are a number other versions of this idea available around the Web.

While looking around for usage and performance examples of application configuration should come from a database or file system. I found an interesting example between the pros and cons of each. So whipped out the trusty IDE (PHP Eclipse) and whipped up this simple addition to the core of CI.

Since my code view seems to be crapping out at the moment I will link to the amazing code on the official wiki.