The best Symfony IDE: PHPEdit
5. April 2009 in Symfony
If you think about the best IDE you will probably think about eclipse with the PDT-Plugin, Netbeans or Kommodo. None of them has special support for the Symfony-Framework. As I wrote in an earlier post I’m using eclipse for my daily work. With some enhancements it is a pretty good IDE for Symfony-Development. Netbeans catched up with the last releases an there is a special Symfony-Support planned in one of the future releases.
Last week there was a new release of the Windows-PHP-IDE PHPEdit. Since Version 3.2 there is an excellent Symfony support in this IDE. A bunch of features makes the development with Symfony a lot more productive. I couldn’t resist and took a deeper look at this software. It was the first time that I used PHPEdit an I’m surprised on how good it is.
Wizards
PHPEdit has a lot of wizards for creating Symfony-Projects and different Symfony artifacts (i.e. modules, actions…). For developers who dont know all of the symfony command line tasks and all of their parameters, these wizards are a great help.
Commands
PHPEdit installs a plugin that allows the IDE to get information about all tasks of the current project. The context menu of the project is file-sensitive. So you will get other tasks in the context menu when clicking on a application than clicking on a module or project. All Symfony tasks are available via context menu. Most of them with an upcoming wizard in which you can set the parameters by mouse clicks
Code Completion and Editor
The Editor has everything you can think of and support for all neccessary file formats (i.e. YAML) are included. Code-Folding,Line-Numbers, Smart Idention and others are available. Plus you have a great IntelliSense support. The Editor knows even the Symfony-Framework functions of the classes. You can jump between Actions and View-Template what is solving one of the most annoying problems if you are working on a large project and have a lot of action.class.php files open.
Conclusion
The makers of PHPEdit did a wunderful job. The symfony support is how I it should be in every IDE 
Beside of this Framework-Specific features there is all you need for PHP-Development. A good PHP-Editor with IntelliSense and PHP-Debugging, Project management, everything is on board and pretty good. The only drawback is that PHPEdit is not freely available. It has a commercial license starting with 89.- Euros for the basic feature edition. If you are not using windows another drawback is that PHPEdit is only available for windows.
I’m still surprised why I never used this IDE before because it has everything you need for PHP development. Maybe it was because of its commercial license. For now it is the best Symfony IDE. The Framework-Support is outstanding. Lets see how the planned Symfony-Support in Netbeans can compete with this.
Lars Olav said on 5. April 2009
I must say I prefer using Zend Studio for Eclipse, http://www.zend.com/en/store/software/studio/. The only negative with that editor is that it is a bit costly. But it is easily worth in considering all the hours I spend with that editor
I like using the symfony cli for generating, clearing cache etc so that is not useful for me but I can see how some would like having the cli commands in the menu.
Generally I just think Zend Studio is the best PHP editor. Excellent auto-completion of custom classes and lots of other nice function. I tried a lot of different editors some years ago, but then my choice fell on Zend Studio and I have never looked back.
I have considered trying the different top editors again to make sure I still use the editor that suits my needs the best, but so far I have not found any good reasons to look at other editors since I do not miss anything in my current choice!
I guess others might disagree and prefer Netbeans, PHPEdit or some other editor, but at least Zend Studio is my favorit for PHP and Symfony development
Timo Haberkern said on 5. April 2009
As always: The choice of an IDE is a mater of taste
I’m using the PDT with WicketShell. But as I wrote PHPEdit looks pretty promising for Symfony Development, so I will maybe switch to it in the future.
Timo
cscsaba said on 9. April 2009
It is good to hear Symfony gets more and more acceptance.
cathleen said on 12. May 2009
Good to know. PHPEdit needs to be supported on Mac OS X. There are a ton of us would gladly switch when that happens.
Ivan said on 12. June 2009
Have you seen sfEclipse (still early but looks promising)
sudhir said on 9. July 2009
And now netbeans 6.8 natively supports symfony
Look at http://blogs.sun.com/netbeansphp/entry/initial_symfony_support
LacyG said on 11. July 2009
Thanks. I will give phpEdit a try
clod said on 30. August 2009
My choice is new free PHP IDE – Codelobster PHP Edition
It has also Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, Smarty and JQuery plug-ins.
LP said on 13. May 2010
nb 6.8 is the better, have a code templates that minimized type code, show symfony tasks on easy way, code completion, etc … try it