PHP has grown to become one of the most wide-spread server-side scripting language that’s used on a daily basis in a variety of ways. For the most part, almost every developer that’s introduced to this programming language uses it and becomes fond of it at some point. With the support of a very large community, this incredibly fast technology is taking over other server-side scripting languages. If you conduct a quick search on the subject you’ll find countless ready-to-use scripts and a fist-full of quality frameworks.
Here you can see we’ve complied 25 Excellent PHP Tools That Will Enhance The Way You Develop in detail. Take a look at a few of these tools, assess which ones address your needs, and take advantage of them. After all, they’re there for us to use.
PHP_Debug
PHP_Debug is very useful open-source tool that allows you to output processing times of your PHP and SQL, check the performance of specific code blocks and get variable dumps in graphical form.
PHPUnit
PHPUnit is a great testing framework that belongs to the xUnit family of testing frameworks. It’s perfect for writing and running automated tests on your PHP code.
phpDocumentor
phpDocumentor, (phpdoc or phpdocu) is an auto-documentation tool for the php language. Similar to Javadoc, and written in php, phpDocumentor can be used from the command line or a web interface to create professional documentation from php source code.
Scavenger
Scavenger is an open source real-time vulnerability management tool. It helps system administrators respond to vulnerability findings, track vulnerability findings, review accepted or false-positive answered vulnerabilities, and not ‘nag’ system administrators with old vulnerabilities.
Xdebug
Xdebug is a PHP extension that helps you debug your scripts by providing a lot of valuable debug information. If a script fails to execute properly, Xdebug will print a full stack trace in the error message, along with function names, parameter values, source files, and line numbers.
MODx
MODx helps you take control of your web content. It’s a fast and reliable Open Source PHP application framework, it frees you to build sites exactly how you want and make them 100% yours.
PHP Object Generator
PHP Object Generator, (POG) is an open sourcePHP code generator which automatically generates clean & tested Object Oriented code for your PHP4/PHP5 application.
CakePHP
CakePHP is one of the most widely used rapid development framework for PHP. It provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications.
PHP/SWF Charts
PHP/SWF Charts is a simple and powerful PHP tool that lets you create attractive web charts and graphs from dynamic data. Use PHP scripts to generate or gather the data from databases, then pass it to this tool to generate Flash (swf) charts and graphs. This tool allows the integration of PHP scripts, and Flash provides the best graphic quality.
BlueShoes
BlueShoes is a comprehensive application framework and content management system. It is written in the widely used web-scripting language PHP. BlueShoes offers excellent support for the popular MySQL database as well as support for Oracle and MSSQL.
Propel
Propel is an open-source Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) library written in PHP5, written on top of PDO. It allows you to access your database using a set of objects, providing a simple API for storing and retrieving data. Propel allows web application developers to work with databases in the same way they work with other classes and objects in PHP.
PHP_Beautifier
PEAR is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components. You will be able to automatically format and clean-up your PHP4 and PHP5 source code.
Phing
Phing is a PHP project build system or build tool based on Apache Ant. You can do anything with it that you could do with a traditional build system like GNU make, and its use of simple XML build files and extensible PHP “task” classes make it an easy-to-use and highly flexible build framework.
CodeIgniter
CodeIgniter is very a powerful PHP framework with a small footprint. It was built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications.
Securimage
Securimage is an open-source free PHP CAPTCHA script for generating complex images and CAPTCHA codes to protect forms from spam and abuse. It can be easily added into existing forms on your website to provide protection from spam bots.
SimplePie
SimplePie is a clear-cut PHP class that can help you work with any RSS feed. It was written in PHP and is Flexible, this way beginners or advanced users can benefit from it alike.
phpMyAdmin
phpMyAdmin is one of the oldest and most useful administrative tools available for database management . It’s useful for everything from constructing and altering databases to debugging applications and making backups. This is a very powerful tool worth having in your arsenal.
Pixy
Pixy is a Java program that performs automatic scans of PHP 4 source code, aimed at the detection of XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities. Pixy takes a PHP program as input, and creates a report that lists possible vulnerable points in the program, together with additional information for understanding the vulnerability.
Phormer
Phormer is a PHP-Based PhotoGallery Manager application, that helps you to store, categorize and trim your photos on the web with various helpful features.
xajax PHP Class Library
xajax is pretty much a PHP class for simplifying your workflow when working with PHP AJAX applications. It gives you an easy-to-use API for quickly managing AJAX-related tasks.
PHP-GTK
PHP-GTK is an extension for the PHP programming language that implements language bindings for GTK+. It provides an object-oriented interface to GTK+ classes and functions and greatly simplifies writing client-side cross-platform GUI applications.
Minify!
Minify is PHP 5 app that helps you combines multiple CSS or Javascript files, removes unnecessary whitespace and comments, and serves them with gzip encoding and optimal client-side cache headers.
gotAPI/PHP
gotAPI is a useful online tool for quickly looking up PHP functions and classes.
PECL
PECL is a very useful directory of all known PHP extensions and a hosting facility for downloading and developing PHP extensions.
Koders
Koders is the leading search engine for open source and other downloadable code now contains over 2 billion lines of code within its repository. This is very useful when you’re searching for various PHP source codes that you may need to replace or enhance, or when you’re not exactly sure of which codes to use, you can search, test, and compare.
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Very intersting stuff! Keep up the awesome posts, I’ll submit them to Blogger Den I’m sure it’ll draw in some traffic
What about symfony and doctrine? You did mention propel but not doctrine?
What a knowledge packed post! Wonderful.
Thanks for this great list.
I did not see FirePHP in the list. It helps me very much to see what is going on behing on on development and production sites.
Also Eclipse PDT is not mentioned.
these are #1 tools for me.
also there is notepad++ which worths mentioning.
Nice work. Seems selective in certain areas, but some of them are new and will be good to look at. One of the better lists i’ve seen.
Thanks!
Hi
a good list for help in PHP web development, but you could also mention for Macs there is a great app called PHPfi (as in function index), which has a local copy of php.net docs on your machine. The very cool thing about is it can store all the comments from the PHP site too, which are very useful. Great for doing web design in PHP when you’re offline or do not want online distractions.
Great collection tools. Thanks
awesome article, thanks
Hi,
A great list of PHP web development tools, some of them I didn’t know, thx.