There have been four phases to the evolution of my PHP development environment. First, I used notepad, FTP and a shared hosting account. WS_FTP to be exact, made by IPSwitch which once sent me a free t-shirt for sending in a testimonial for their website.

Once I took on a job working on a PHP application larger than one file in size (Contact Administrator), the single file per window, single undo abilities of notepad didn't cut it anymore. I upgraded to TextPad. I gained the convenience of a single window for all open files, syntax highlighting, multiple levels of undo, and the ability to replace patterns in all open files. My routine still consisted of opening all the files in a project in TextPad, writing code, saving, uploading by FTP to the server, and testing the changes live. Continued »