Hello there friends and neighbors!
To preface, I would like to say that I'm never going to transition to doing this for a living, this will always be a personal hobby so hopefully that helps with the scope and scale of things.
I've used phpBB as a session base for over a decade now. I don't use anything else from it except on one site, where I use the forum system in it's entirety. A couple of times in the time I've used it, PHP has retired stuff that completely broke the system, causing me a lot of issue with not a lot of help(from phpBB, not you guys) other than "just update the forum software".
So I've contemplated building a framework of sorts in a modular fashion and by that I mean a core sessions system, a plugin for the forum features, another for things that I might need(contact, support stuff, etc). I know that things like this exist but to be clear, I'm not doing it because I think I can do it better, I'm doing this because I want to get better at making something like this.
Currently, my work environment is in Debian, I use SSHFS to connect to my servers and edit in MS Code. If I need to change a file, I open that file and modify it. Any files that it references, I open in the editor and make those changes. Saving the file saves directly to the site I'm working on. Backups exist in case something goes horribly awry.
I've heard and read a lot about working on projects and many things are mentioned that I don't know or work with, various IDEs, things that make deployment easier, etc. I just wonder if there's something I can change in my work environment that would make this easier or if I might as well just keep on keeping on in the way I'm doing it now. Like I said before, I'm never going to be doing this large-scale, I'm just a single guy looking at this code, nobody else will ever need to work on it with me.
Any thoughts or insight is very much appreciated. Thanks for your time!