Tobias Schlitt has a quick post to his blog about the release of the phpDocumentor for VIM project he's been working on over to github.

phpDocumentor for VIM (PDV) is a project which resulted from my efforts to create a comfortable programming environment for PHP in the VIM editor. Since the server which hosted the SVN repository is to be switched off the next days, I finally moved development over to github. In addition to that, I seized the chance to rename the project itself to VIP (VIM integration for PHP).

There's a few other goodies in the repository besides just the VIP tool. You can grab some (or all) of the code by following the instructions given on the github page.

In a new post to his blog Davey Shafik goes on a bit more about NetBeans which is quickly becoming his favorite IDE in the series of ones he's tried (including Zend's offering, Eclipse with PDT and his most recent choice NetBeans).

And let me tell you, Netbeans 6.8 is nothing short of amazing. Debugging with xdebug is now almost as easy as ZDE, it works instantly on 90% of my remote machines, but I have 1 cluster for which Netbeans simply *cannot* find the local source file, making it impossible to debug.

Watches, breakpoints (though, I haven't figured out conditional breakpoints, if they are there), callstack and local variables work as you would expect (though watches/variables sometimes refuse to populate larger vars, I think this is xdebug config related). In addition, Netbeans supports arbitrary breakpoint groupings; these can be enabled and disabled as a group - very neat.

He points out the excellent PHPUnit support the IDE has to offer and includes some screenshots of how you can run tests right inside the IDE, displaying code coverage information both at the file and line of code level.

Following the stepping down of Cal Evans as the Editor-in-Chief of the IBuildings techPortal website, a new community member has stepped up to take on the role - Lorna Mitchell.

Allow me to introduce myself; my name is Lorna Mitchell and I'm your new Editor-in-Chief here at techPortal. This site was grown from an ambition by Ibuildings to allow great content, mostly from Ibuildings developers, to be collected into one place and shared with the wider community. Over time this has grown to include the content from the sessions at DPC (Dutch PHP Conference) in 2009, as well as some shorter technical posts.

In her personal post Lorna also mentions other roles she'll be taking on in the IBuildings PHP Centre of Expertise.

Jason Houle submitted a recent post from his blog looking at the integration of the Dijit editor with a Zend Framework application:

In one of my current projects, AircraftConnection.com, I decided to use the dijit.Editor WYSIWYG editor in my user's forms. I ran into a few problems and could not find much documentation on the topic.

He wanted a few things - different ordering of some of the elements, submission of the contents of the editor on POST and the ability to pre-populate the data the user had already submitted. The post walks you through these changes, starting from making the basic Zend_Form instance with a customized Dijit form element out to adding in the code to push the current user data into the editor instance.

Brian Moon points out a (sometimes annoying) habit of PHP when it comes to newlines - it drops them after the closing tag.

Have you ever noticed that PHP eats the newlines after a closing PHP tag? Not sure what I mean? There is lots on Google about it. [...] So, why does PHP do this? Well, you have to go back 11 years. PHP 3 was emerging. I was just starting to use it for Phorum at the time. There were two reasons.

The first reason was the it, at least in the minds of the developers of the language, "removed all traces of PHP" from the script without any training newlines to show for it. The second case was a bit more valid - because lots of editors at the time required newlines at the end of every line of code. This caused loads of trouble tracking down things like the infamous "Headers already sent" issues (pre-output buffering).

Ian Selby has posted about a screencast that he did for Aptana:

I'm also posting this since we recently relaunched our screencast site, http://tv.aptana.com. It's actually really cool as its running entirely on Aptana Jaxer, and built with the soon-to-be released Active JS framework

The screencast gives a brief overview of the features the IDE has to offer and gives you a pretty good idea of what the interface is like. You can find out more about the tool on the main Aptana website.

Smashing Magazine has put together an article comparing sveral of the popular PHP IDEs on a list of about twenty different features:

Everyone wants to be more productive, make fewer mistakes and write good code. Of course, that all depends on you, but in most cases integrated development environments (IDEs) can help you achieve those goals more easily. Unfortunately, choosing the right IDE is very difficult because a lot needs to be considered. [...] In this post, we'll take a close look at the most popular PHP IDEs, exploring their functions, comparing them in a table and drawing some conclusions.

The article is less about finding the "best of the best" our of the reviewed IDEs and more about helping you figure out which one would be the right fit for you. They compare them in the features they offer - syntax highlighting, navigation, debugging, versioning and more. There's even a handy chart with all of these laid out for each editor they reviewed (PDT 1, PDT 2.0, Zend Studio 6 & Netbeans 6.5).

There's two new posts that look at an up and coming PHP IDE (really a PHP plugin for an existing IDE) - NetBeans - one from Mike Borozdin and another from Juozas Kaziukenas.

Here's some of Mike's comments:

NetBeans is mostly known for Java developers as a good and free IDE. At the same time recently NetBeans started supporting other languages, like C/C++, Ruby and finally PHP. Moreover it not only supports plain PHP, but it offers quite good support of HTML and JavaScript. [...] Generally, I feel pretty good about NetBeans. It seems to be working much faster than Eclipse, both in terms of the loading time and in terms of code editing and code completion as well.

And some thoughts from Juozas:

I find more more articles about NetBeans 6.5 IDE for PHP, for example this Mike's article. Why people like it so much? After some weeks spent reading all these articles, I finally decided to throw away all other editors and try new-and-shiny NetBeans. [...] Overall it's just a wonderful tool - stable, helpful and being actively developed. Give it a try!

In a new post to his blog Quinton Parker shares a few tips for those PHP developers out there using vim as their editor of choice.

VIM is a powerful command-line text editor usually a default package in the majority of *nix distros (that includes Mac's OS X). I believe there are ports available for other OSes, even winblows. Firstly, vim is a man's editor. Whiners and GUI lovers can stop reading now. Although, VIM offer GUI ports such as MacVim. Men with thick beards, please stay tuned.

He starts with a bit of comparison between opinions on IDE versus editor and comments from others on both sides of the vim argument. Then he gets to the tips - here's a list of some of them:

• Syntax highlighting
• Tabs as spaces
• Search and show matches as you type
• PHP-specific highlighting
• Highlighting matching brackets/parentheses
• Auto change to to editing file's cwd

If you're a fan of the Textmate editor for the Mac platform, you might want to check out this new post from the cssgallery website. It shows how you can get your favorite editor to check your PHP syntax for you.

A nice "hidden" feature that Textmate has, is to check the syntax of the php files you are writing, and display a popup with the result. [...] Each time you save, a syntax check will be done, and a popup will show you the result

You'll need to edit the PHP bundle slightly to get things working, but that's as easy as going through the UI and changing a drop-down value to activate the check. You'll need to have a php binary where the editor can use it, but most OS X installs will have that in place anyway. Check out this image to see the end result.