I’ve been using Dreamweaver for about 10 years in some form or fashion. It actually started when I purchased Allaire HomeSite 3.0 in 1997. Macromedia purchased Allaire in 2001 and eventually merged HomeSite with their Dreamweaver product. Dreamweaver 8 is what I’ve been using for the past 2 years; that is, until I found PHP nirvana!

I have tried other IDE’s off and on for the past 5 years – trying to get more of a Visual Studio experience. I was really jealous of the code-completion and hinting features that were available in VS. Dreamweaver does ok at basic function hints for PHP, but nothing I found did a great job of combining all the site management features of Dreamweaver with the intelligent code parsing (ie. reading my classes and adding them to the code-completion hints). I’ve tried Eclipse with its PHP plug-in, UltraEdit, Zend Studio, phpDesigner and probably some others that I’m not listing.

» Read more: Why I switched to a new IDE for PHP development