Re: What do people use to design web pages for PHP? Pete:can you give me some guidence?

Dittos for PHP and Eclipse (PDT). The reason I bring that up is because I
haven't seen anyone talk about source control, workflow management, or other
such tasks that are quite important to developers. A simple text editor is
great for writing code in isolation of a larger project but once you start
having to manage that project you have to start relying on external
applications whereas many IDE's, such as NetBeans or Eclipse, integrate that
management into a more or less complete package.

IIRC, this thread started because of editing PHP and HTML. I have used
Dreamweaver in the past for PHP and HTML, and I liked it because it was very
visual. But as I got some more experience I realized that the code that it
was generating was, to some degree, un-maintainable. That is from the days
of DW 4 MX and so it might have improved since then, but back then, the code
was not so good (and neither was mine :-)). I know it's tempting to look
for an IDE that does simple drag and drop, but to make it simple for you it
needs to make it complex for the application. Believe it or not, most of the
performance issues for web pages written in PHP does not come from PHP. It
comes from the rendered content or the database... usually. :-) So,
getting to know some of the things that can cause those problems is a good
thing.

So, what am I really saying? I guess that when deciding how to develop
PHP applications, look further ahead than code completion to help you
streamline your tasks. I often use vim for doing quick changes, but if I'm
working on a project I'm always in an IDE (Studio for Eclipse 7.1 beta, on
my machine). IDE's do run slower than a text editor, but unless you know
your project line-by-line having that additional help is often good.

Another reason to use an IDE? Debugging and Profiling. Gotta have it. PDT
has it built in. XDebug can be used with Notepad++, though I don't know how
easy that would be to get it up and running on your i. The Zend Debugger
(free) is included with Zend Core, Zend Server and PDT and is ready to go.

Kevin:

I agree that you pay a price for ease of design. I guess I am spoiled by DDS
and RPG. I wanted something that allowed me to setup a web page easily and
create the HMTL for me, to let me focus on PHP.

I originally downloaded Eclipse from ZEND but had problems getting it to
work. I consulted with an old co-worker and he said they use an older
version, so I took his advise and am running the same version. (zend studio
5.5).

I have so many downloads on my desktop it is getting full. I downloaded the
dreamweaver trial and wanted to look at that.
The tutorials I saw show you how to put beautiful images on the page and put
headings out there using style sheets.
As with everything, the basics are not obvious. I guess nobody creates web
pages with input.