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I think I have finally found an IDE I am satisfied with. While CodeLobster does a great job, it has a few unresolved bugs that can cause some problems that I have not been able to get around yet.

I just started trying out the commercial PHP IDE, phpDesigner 7, from MPSoftware. It is not free, but it is also not that pricey for the feature set and compatibility it has. It is $40 for non-commercial use, $95 for commercial, with 2 - 3 licences built in so you can use it on your desktop, laptop and at work (with the latter only included with a commercial license). Admittedly I have not really torn into most of the advanced features so far, but I can confirm that the code completion works very well, as does the syntax highlighting. Speaking of which, PD7 has an ingenious feature that I am surprised no other IDE I have found has. It has intelligent code highlighting that grays out the code blocks that you are not looking at. For example, if you have HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP all in one file, clicking inside the JS grays out all of the non-JS code so you can only focus on what is most relevant. The same goes for the HTML, CSS and PHP. It is a wonderful feature that I already don't know what I ever did without, as it makes it so much easier to make sense of huge piles of mixed code.

It is also highly compatible, and it has intelligent syntax highlighting for HTML, XHTML, Javascript (including all major frameworks: jQuery, Ext JS, YUI, Dojo, MooTools and Prototype), PHP, CSS, C#, Java, Perl, VBScript, Python and others. An update is also forthcoming that will include full support for HTML 5, CSS3 and Javascript 2. Many other free and low-cost IDEs are simply stating they are going to "wait and see" with HTML5, but PD7 appears to be moving ahead with it.

All-in-all, it is a great IDE, and even with all of these features it still feels light-weight, like a standard text-editor, something I cannot say about Zend, Aptana and Eclipse. It seems like a bargain for the price, and I feel so far that it is one of the best PHP IDEs available. Even ignoring the price, I would say it beats Aptana hands down, and it is only a fraction of the cost. They offer a 21-day trial period for anyone interested in trying it out. I can almost guarantee I will be buying a commercial license when my trial is over.

I was just looking into IDEs a few days ago after getting mad at notepad++. (If you're wondering why, I tend to do a fair bit of programming on the run, so running it off portable storage is important.)

I use Zend as my main IDE. But it feels slow.

I glanced over phpDesigner 7 when I was searching for alternatives, and it has really nice CSS/HTML preview abilities. The CSS workflow is halfway between a text-only IDE and Dreamweaver (in a good way ). I might download the trial and see how it goes as my main IDE.

pax.

I hope you like it!

As a side note, I actually saw when I was Googling reviews and info about it that there is a portable version out there. I am not sure if the company makes it themselves or if it is a hack, but even if it is the latter, you should still be able to buy a license and activate it no problem (just try it out for a while on the trial and make sure everything works fine in the portable version. I have tried out a few broken portable apps).

While I know this is from a while ago, I just wanted to update and say I have been using phpDesigner 7 for months now (for all my PHP development), and it is, in my opinion, the hands-down best PHP/JS/HTML/CSS IDE out there! Particularly now that it seems CodeLobster has changed its plugin sales policy, and instead of selling individual plugins for $15 - $20 (and how many framework plugins do you need? Not like you need Cake, CI and Symfony!), they are now charging $99 for a Pro version that includes all plugins! Very disappointing...

Well, that just happens to be the price of phpDesigner 7, which absolutely blows CodeLobster out of the water. It feels lightweight like CL, but has the features of the big bloated IDEs like Eclipse, Aptana, or Zend Studio. Full support with both Apache or Zend Server for live debugging, an amazing and unobtrusive project system that allows you to simply attach a root folder to a project to create a Visual Studio-style project setup, and each project allows you to add a folder containing a PHP library to automatically add it to the code completion. I have used it with both Zend and CodeIgniter and it works amazingly! It can basically adapt to any PHP framework that may come out in the future, and it even adds XML documentation comments into the code completion pop-ups. And, of course, it has built-in support for jQuery, Ext JS, YUI, Dojo, MooTools and Prototype out of the box.

And again, I just can't say enough good things about the "dim" feature in phpDesigner 7! This was the feature I believe I mentioned above where when you click inside a block of PHP, all non-PHP code gets "dimmed-out" to gray, and the same goes for PHP, CSS and JS. It is an awesome feature, particularly if you are working on an "all-in-one-pot" page that is becoming a tangled mess of code sections. It really helps you see what you are working on.

So if you use PHP, give phpDesigner 7 a try! It is not free software, but it is more than worth the $99 price of admission. Heck, I think it is 2x better than Zend Studio, which is $300! The only competitor it has in that price range I know of is CodeLobster Pro, and phpDesigner 7 would have to win that one hands down. I won't even mention Dreamweaver because it makes DW look like a free editor no one uses anymore (I am still puzzled by the poor client-side/server-side IDE in Dreamweaver). Try it out!

awesome I will give it a shot.

My favourite IDE is Codelobster PHP Edition
It has great support for all popular frameworks.

I had some very serious issues with Codelobster about 2 or 3 years ago. They have probably fixed it now, but every once in a while when you saved, it would just save a 0 byte blank file in place of your code. Usually it was OK, since you could just resave (your code was still loaded in memory in the IDE), but once I lost a ton of code when it was unfortunately the closing save that screwed up. After that I quit using it, never to return.

Also, as an update to this very old review, I have turned around a bit on phpDesigner since this was written. The "dim" feature loses a lot of its punch once you start working with frameworks where you aren't mixing different languages in the same file much anymore.

If I was to be doing any PHP work today, I would likely use phpStorm, just since it is like my main IDE, WebStorm. I don't know if I would buy it all over again, though, since Netbeans and Eclipse both offer great PHP environments for free. But WebStorm is worth every cent for complex Javascript development, such as SPA scripts, Impact or node.

So just so I understand you recommend WebStorm for JS right?

Yeah, I can't really say phpStorm is worth the money with good open source options out there. But nothing comes close to WebStorm for JS. Not that WS is just that much more advanced than phpStorm, but it is that the JS IDE open source world is so far behind.