What a PHP Developer Needs
January 10, 2008 – 5:04 pmWhat does a PHP developer need? Especially for coding PBBGs? In this post I will list some tools, services and scripts that I use, and some that I should use. It’s your choice to use them as well or not, but I find them to be extremely helpful. The tools aren’t listed in any particular order.
- A webhost
This is more of a give-away. All websites need this, even simple HTML sites. If you are looking to host a PBBG, you should have plenty of bandwidth. Since games tend to serve up a lot of a requests in a short time, your webhost should be able to handle the load as well. A VPS or a dedicated hostiing server should be sufficient, but shared hosting is also possible to small games.
- A control panel
A control panel makes administrating your web server much easier. Common control panels are CPanel and Plesk. If you search on Google, you can also find some free control panels to use.
- A local host setup
I find it very convenient to work on a local host (ie. my own computer). It removes the need to upload files/images, and you can quickly test pages and fix bugs. I recommend using XAMPP or WAMP if you use Windows, and MAMP for Mac users.
- A text editor
Using Notepad to code a website sounds cool, but honestly, life’s much easier with a good text editor. You should get one that supports syntax highlighting, automatic indentation, search/replace and maybe collapsable code blocks. I recommend TextPad. It may not have all the features but it’s fast, lightweight and I’ve used it for a long time
So far, the tools and services listed are pretty much the basics. Read more to see what scripts would be helpful for quick and easy PBBG development.
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3 Responses to “What a PHP Developer Needs”
Just a quick add about the programs used for coding with OS X:
BBEdit - The best there is, but sadly not free
Smultron - Decent editor and a big plus on the Open Source community (free)
I think that a decent FTP-Program should also be added because uploading everything manually can become a pain in the @$$.
Here’s my OS X favorite: Cyberduck
- Sinzygy
By Sinzygy on Jan 10, 2008
I always use Vim for text editing, it does take some time to learn but it is a really good text editor. I’ve never used one of those bundled Apache/PHP/MySQL/whatever else packages - I’ve always downloaded them and set them up seperately.
By Graham on Jan 15, 2008
Great post. We also use Vim for text editing, it. Love BBEdit, too… but of course it’s for Mac. Sigh.
Kind regards,
Martin
By ZYON on Feb 25, 2008