What PHP/JS specific features does Dreamweaver CS5 have? - php

I'm debating on whether to get Dreamweaver CS5 or Zend Studio for my web developing. I was happy with Dreamweaver until I tried Zend Studio (and Netbeans for that matter) and realized what kind of great code formatting and completion I was missing out on.
My question is, does the newest version of Dreamweaver support:
PHP / JS formatting
Code completion (including custom classes)

Don't know if this will help much b/c I don't know what previous versions of DW had or didn't have. I was using the old Homesite/Coldfusion Studio editor before starting a new job where I had to use DW CS5. For PHP it will help with auto completion of variables, both $_(whatever) type, as well as one's you've previously defined on the page.
DW also checks for things like missing ";" at the end of lines and brackets not being closed correctly when you're doing a bunch of function(calls(inside(other(functions())))).
If you want the WYSIWYG part, it's there, but it's trivial to make it go away and stay on a "code only" view.
Not sure about the JS side as much. I usually debug via Firefox tools.
Hope that helps.
D.

Related

Is there a way to make Visual Studio Code recognize HTML syntax in PHP files

I am using Visual Studio Code on a Mac to work on WordPress applications.
Is there a way to make Visual Studio Code recognize HTML and use it's features (mainly autocompletion) inside PHP files?
I've searched for this answer before but just get told to Go to Visual Studio Code Settings: File >> Preferences >> User Settings
// Place your settings in this file to overwrite the default settings
{
// Configure file associations to languages (e.g. "*.extension": "html"). These have precedence over the default associations of the languages installed.
"files.associations": {"*.php": "html"}
}
But doing this makes you lose all PHP support and autocompletion.
I wish Microsoft would realize that PHP developers commonly use PHP and HTML together when creating applications/websites. I would love to use VS Code instead of the magnificent but expensive PHP storm if possible.
You can install this plugin:
PHP Intelephense
As far as I can tell, it does. Take a look at this php file I have created in VS Code (no extensions), with HTML inside the file with syntax highlighting for both languages.
There is a button (It should say the word PHP) in the bottom right corner of the screen that allows you to switch the syntax highlighting and autocompletion to another language, and while this does temporarily turn off PHP syntax, it will allow you to code in HTML a lot easier.
You can enable html support in any language by adding the following to your settings.json file:
"emmet.includeLanguages": {
"your-language": "html",
"rust": "html",
"php": "html",
"javascript": "html",
}
Very easy solution
Search emmet in settings and remove php form Emmet: Exclude Languages list
This will definitely work for everyone
I also faced this genuine concern while learning PHP, and the only solution I came up with at the moment is clicking on PHP button on bottom right corner of VS Code screen.
I am attaching the screenshot below with that PHP button highlighted so you would be able to locate it easily. Once clicked it will ask for a language you want autocomplete to work on, select HTML and it would start autocompleting html, click again to enable PHP autocomplete.
I also happened to come across GitHub Pilot Extension, you need to be a student for availing this service for free or you'll have to buy membership, It is a good tool for auto complete although that is not the gist of it's use, It is something great invented for learners and also professional coders.
I used to use PHPEd and it has content-aware autocomplete. It knows the content that your cursor is in: php, html, css, js, etc and suggests tags/attributes/functions/etc based on the language where the cursor is. The entire problem with VSCode is its decidedly unintelligent “intellisense” that relies wholly on what language the document is defined as. Any IDE worth its salt is going to have content aware auto-completion. The only satisfactory answer to your question is make your own snippets and turn off emmet and php auto-completion.

Tools to understand website source code

I recently had a website developed by an external source. They gave me the source code as well as sql files.
When I extract the source code I see folders like Smarty, fckeditor and many php files. I want to start editing these as I find it to be the best way to learn. What tool should I use. I tried using trial version of PHPdesigner, but it just doesnt open my php files.
Is there any tool that can take all these files in the form of a project and simultaneously show me a visual display of any changes that I make.
I suppose it is very clear that I am new to this. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Just use simple text editor with some code highlight like Notepad++
It is free to use, very fast and it does what you need.
First of all try to know what are the different file types and which lanuguage are those targeted to. Once you know that you can then decide on the editor.
What i recommend is you try to find out if they used a framework for the website, something like CakePHP or CodeIgniter. The next step after you find out is to go the framework website and start reading the documentation.
If the site id developed in php most likely any type of WYSIWYG editing is going to inaccurate. This is because a number of different files need to be processed and combined by the php interpreter before they come together to make any given page or view. Thus the only way to really preview is to run it on a server. Since you say there are sql files he has laso used a DB to store something so most likely any changes you would need to make are going to be spread between both the php source files and the records in the db.
Aptana (Which is Eclipse based) is great at handling many different file type in one IDE. I would use Studio 2 w/ the plugins you need or if you feel cutting edge try Studio 3. It's cross platform so Linux/Windows or OSX.

PHP code analayzer and other tools

I am new to PHP (worked around 7 years on ASP.NET)
We are looking for some tools for PHP which we can use to make sure code quality is good.
we are using Notepad++ as a IDE and SVN for code repository.
I became a convert to Netbeans after using NP++ for quite some time. It's got some cool formatting and on-the-fly code checks, as well as very thorough autosuggests and integration with version control (subversion for me)
My coworkers use Rapid PHP which is just about identical, though it has a great block highlight feature.
Separate of editors, I can say enough how great the W3 validator is for making sure the output is really good. Often times it can help you spot missing or misplaced end tags or other minor html issues like that. After Netbeans, firebug, and Chrome Inspector, I'd say it's one of my top used tools.

Enable PHP highlights in VS 2010?

I've heard that Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 has support for PHP. When I load a PHP file though, it has nothing highlighted and is nothing more than a glorified text editor.
Is there a way to enable it?
You can enable syntax highlighting for php files using a simple hack in Visual Studio 2010 (might also work for earlier versions)
Open Tools -> Options dialog from the menu, and select Text Editor -> File Associations on the left. Add php as a new extension and select 'Microsoft Visual C++' in the adjacent combo box. Apply and now you and open and edit any php file in Visual Studio with Syntax highlighting and code folding. The only problem come is when the file has mixed php and html code. It does not look really good and editing is painful.
I have tried VS.php, and I am certainly not impressed. The only thing it can add to visual studio is creating a php project easily, otherwise, I haven't been able to find it any more useful.
As far as I know, we don't do PHP support out of the box. You probably need a third-party component such as this one: http://www.jcxsoftware.com/vs.php
I've found by using the VS2010 script editor for PHP it does 90% of what I wanted.
As Samnan states - goto Open Tools -> Options dialog from the menu, and select Text Editor -> File Associations
and told VS2010 to use its script editor
Also XRefresh plugin for firefox is quite handy for quickly viewing code changes on a second monitor running firefox.
On Microsoft Connect, it seems that this is a feature request. And they've talked about it on MSDN. But so far, syntax highlighting doesn't seem to be a builtin feature just yet. Though, Expression Web 2 and 3 do have IntelliSense in the HTML designer, we could be seeing native syntax highlighting in the Visual Studio 2010 RTM come March.
Hope this helps.
I've heard rumors about them adding it in the final release, however there is no native support for PHP within the beta right now.

PHP syntax highlighting in Visual Web Developer?

I recently installed PHP 5 on IIS, however, I am unable to find a PHP syntax highlighting plug-in or extension for VWD. Where can I find a plug-in? I thought there was an official one.
Consider PHP IDE for Visual Studio.
http://www.jcxsoftware.com/vs.php
I have used this and it adds a lot of nice PHP specific features to Visual Studio.
From their site...
Editor and File Management
•PHP4 and PHP5 Support
•Syntax Coloring for PHP, Smarty, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML and XSLT
•File templates for PHP, Smarty, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML and XSLT
•Intellisense for PHP, Smarty, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML and XSLT
Debugging
•XDebug and DBG support
•Debug PHP, JavaScript and .Net in one single session
•Built-in Apache web server for ease of debugging. Preconfigured with Php4, Php5, XDebug and DBG.
I've tried a lot of text editors, some free, some commercial. So far Visual Studio is the only one that has the right combination of features to be most useful to me. So, coding PHP in VS is important to me.
You can trick Visual Studio (and hopefully also Visual Web Developer) into thinking .php files are C++ with a registry hack. The syntax highlighting is close enough to be useful.
This blog post explains how to do it for all versions of VS: http://blog.cumps.be/visual-studio-2008-and-php-coloring/
I don't know about older versions, but VWD 2010 allows you to link any extension to any type of formatting in its options.
Tools->Options
click 'show all options'
Expand 'Text editor'
click on 'file extensions'
type in 'php' and select how you want it to be formatted (I recommend the Automatic Editor Selector), click Add
And there you go! Next time you load the page you will see the changes. If you don't like it, there's 20 other styles to choose from.
There is no official plugin for PHP for Visual Web Developer. I believe that this is because Microsoft would rather you use their .NET products, (notably ASP) which serves most of if not all of (I can't exactly say as I don't really use ASP as much as PHP) of the functionality of PHP.
There are however, some very good PHP IDEs out there. A list of which you Here
thx, I use the last post with "HTML format" instead "automatic editor selector"
I would recommend using Netbeans. It has code completion for PHP and runs xdebug for debugging. I've been using it for over a year and the support for PHP just keeps getting better.
Definitely worth trying.
I would recommend Visual Studio with this Extension :
http://phalanger.codeplex.com/
It is free and gives you more functionality than most of the expensive tools.
if you're using windows there's an application called notepad++ that will do syntax highlighting for dozens of languages. I used it for C but I know it has a php syntax highlighter and many more languages coming along. Check it out on sourceforge. If your using Linux or Unix you can use K Advanced Text Editor (kate). It also has a console window built in.
What I am looking is for a debugger for PHP that is as useful as the one built into Visual Studios. I searched high and low for this and there seems to be none that works well.
What I used is the PHP Designer 2007 - Personal Version 5.0.2 is a fully functional php editor, for free! from mpsoftware[dot]dk/, however I like using MSVWD a lot too, and now that I've seen how to make php files work in it, I gonna stick with that! Thanks!
btw Aptana Studio looks promising too tho
The closest Visual Studio like PHP environment I have found yet is CodeLobster. It has a free version for PHP and CSS, as well as for pay versions that include for the Pro version a plug-in for CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Drupal, Facebook, JQuery, Joomla, Smarty, Symfony, WordPress and Yii.
It isn't perfect, but it is pretty good and free for the basic version.

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