Whats the best web editing software to use?

emma896

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micmac

Hi,
My personal opinion is to use a somewhat simple text editor...such as notepad but for ease of use dreamweaver seems to be one of the standards.
You certainly get better code structures hand coding compared to the commercial editors.

jazz_snob

Everyone has a favorite, and mine on Windows is TextPad, which is like $27. More recently I've switched to jEdit 4.1 because its runs on win, mac and Linux.

emma896

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Davy

Acquire a test server?

The best thing to do when you're starting up is volunteer for a starting php project and ask if you can test some scripts on thier server as well as contributing code to thier project. That's what I did over at BenchMark Database

micmac

Hi again,
If you set up a local server you can test your scripts on the fly.
I'm assuming you haven't got one set up....if not...checkout firepages. They have a great bundle package that is easy to configure.

vinny199

emma896,

yes, lots of the guys in this forum are very knowledgable and also very helpful, as you may have noticed.

so, to them, writing from scratch with a notepad or a simple text editor is the best way, "the pure way" and they keep improving.

but if like me you have to balance your learning curve with actually getting somewhere and have some working websites up and running reasonnably quick, you should really turn to DreamweaverMX (or MX2004).

You will still be challenged to learn (look i still come in this forum a lot) but in fairness, many things you neeed to do "as standard" will be done instantly for you within seconds.

there are also top extensions (little pluggins) you can add to the software to keep making your life easy.

so, it's up to you and I know the good php guys don't like to hear much of dreamweaver mx, but as a practical tool, it is unmatched at this stage.

My opinion...

Vinny

emma896

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vinny199

The all you need is to choose a server model as your test server, install it and set up virtual sites (& instal MySql & phpMyadmin if not done so).

I'm using xp pro as a operating system on my work computer so the easiest was to install IIS which is on the XP cd and can be installed as an option (but you can choose apache etc)

it works pretty well, never encountered any compatibility issues up to now

Roger_Ramjet

I'm not surprised it does not work in Frontpage, it is a load of crap like most things MickySoft produces. It will take you longer to learn how to use frontpage effectively than it would to learn how to use the basic dozen html tags that are all anyone ever really needs.

Even Dreamweaver will not be a lot of use if you want to include PHP scripts. The best you can hope for is to generate static html that you cut and paste into your php as required, and to do that you'll need to understand the html.

There is a thread in the echo lounge that discusses editors at great length: http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10209798&perpage=15&pagenumber=1

My personal favourite is UltraEdit.

PS the tags you really need are:

<head> this forum abounds with links to header scripts that you can use even if you don't understand them
<body> the actual content of the page
<table> used for page layout as well as data presentation, even though we should'nt
<tr> a row in the table
<td> a cell in a row
<font> the font you want, including colour, style and size
<a> a link to another page or resource
<img> an image or picture
<br> new line
<p> new paragraph
<form> a form for data entry and submission
<select> with <option> a combo-box that the user select from
<input> data entry: either a text box, a check box, a button to click, or an image that works like a button

These will cover 99% of the web pages you'll ever write, or at least they cover 99% of the websites I have written and I work with dynamic database driven websites on a commercial basis (I'm a database programmer by trade). How difficult is that?

Use these resources to get you started:
html ref: http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/ and http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_reference.asp
html events: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/eventattributes.asp
style sheets: http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/css/ and http://css.maxdesign.com.au/selectutorial/
php and mysql (with downloadable chapters) http://www.sitepoint.com/books/phpmysql1/

Megahertza

I use Dreamweaver because it automatically colours your code for easy coding witch is something notepad can not do, plus it also has shortcuts when using certain functions and codes such as

(include(), require(),$HTTP_GET_VARS[] or $_GET[])

And there is much more it can do, Remember that webpages are made up of over thing than php and dreamweaver is also very code with other codes.

If you want to test your scripts on the fly I suggest you get

Wamp Server

Its easy to install and has evcerything you need including PHP5

If you want some thing smaller try

Firepage's PHPdev

Roger_Ramjet

It's all very well pumping Dreamweaver, but at $350 a pop it is not cheap. Or are you all a bunch of thieves who use a cracked copy?

Personally, I use UltraEdit because it is an excellent editor with bundles of features including colour coding, auto indent, syntax checking, FTP, and an infinity of configuration options. At $35 for a full licence it is also very cheap.

EDIT EDIT EDIT
Just downloaded a PHP-Dev tool from Sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/devphp/
Have not had much time to try it out but it looks interesting. Here is the blurb on it:

"Dev-PHP is a full-featured IDE for PHP. It is fast, it is powerful, it is easy to use and it has a lot of cool features like a class browser, an internal browser to preview scripts and full integration with the PHP parser and the PHP-GTK library"

Be very interesting to see how the script preview works, trouble is all my current pages need the backend database so I'll have to install MySQL as well. It should be just what you need though Emma. (in case you don't know, source forge is a major centre for the open source movement - all code and applications are free)

micmac

..... and as stated earlier emma, a test server would be more than suitable in YOUR circumstance.

emma896

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tullmejs

I recently reviewed some editors, I am rather new to PHP as well. I wanted a rather plain text editor but a bit better than notepad.

"Crimson Editor" proved to be the choice for me. Built in FTP is so convenient; whenever I save I save it at the server.

Syntax highlighting is good as well.

It's freeware.

Hope you find Your favourite editor :-)