Review: PHP Designer 2007 Professional
Editor: PHP Designer 2007 Professional
Version: 5.0
Developer: MPSoftware
Platform/OS: Windows
WYSIWYG: No
Price: €55/$69 USD
PHP Designer 2007, just released this week, is the newest iteration of MPSoftware’s PHP Designer series. Long touted as one of the best free PHP editors around, PHP Designer’s new version brings with it a new licensing structure: There is the free Personal version (which can’t be used for commercial work) and the more robust Professional version, which is now priced at €55/$69 USD. While PHP Designer 2007 Professional is primarily aimed at PHP programmers, the editor certainly holds its own in the HTML editor arena. Is it worth the new price? I guess that depends on the type of coding you do.
What I Like
- Intelligent Syntax Highlighter. While you are in a document that contains separate languages, placing your cursor in an HTML block, for example, highlights (i.e., colours) all the HTML in the file and greys out the other languages.
- To Do and Bug List Managers. You can have inline or general to do and bug lists for your documents and projects. Handy for reminders.
- PHP Debugger. Assuming you have PHP installed on your computer, you can test your scripts from within the editor. Errors show up in the editor, and you double-click on the error message to go right to the problem.
- Code hinting for HTML and PHP.
- Code completion for HTML.
- Bracket highlighting/matching.
- PHP Code Inspector. Shows you all your include files, variables, classes, and functions.
Gripes
- Code hinting for HTML requires you to first press
ctrl+space. - Code hinting, while using Intelligent Highlighter, brings up a list of ALL hints, regardless of the active language. In other words, the dropdown contains all HTML elements, HTML attributes, HTML events, PHP functions, user variables, and Smarty variables and functions instead of only HTML elements, for example.
- Code completion for HTML places your cursor after the closing tag, rather than between the opening and closing tags.
- There seems to be little CSS support beyond syntax highlighting.
- The beta version of PHP Designer supported “Multi” language highlighting, which has now been replaced by the Intelligent Highlighter. What this means is that your files can only be highlighted as one language at a time if you don’t want to use the Intelligent Highlighter.
- The code snippet and template functionality are pretty rudimentary.
Wishlist
- Column selection and editing.
- Better overall CSS support.
- Multi-language syntax highlighting apart from the Intelligent Highlighter.
- HTML/CSS code inspectors.
- Code collapse.
- Advanced code snippets.
- Improved HTML code completion (i.e., cursor placement.)
Overall
Because I spend most of my time coding HTML/CSS, I’m looking for an HTML/CSS editor with PHP functionality rather than a PHP editor with HTML/CSS functionality, and my score above reflects this. Other users may find the PHP focus more beneficial. PHP Designer 2007 Professional definitely seems like a solid piece of software. It has its quirks, but I find it pretty polished. If you write a lot of PHP and are looking for an affordable IDE, download the demo and give it a go.
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