I’ve fallen in love with another text editor. Its been since a while since I’ve last opened SublimeText and Coda. It has also been a little bit challenging to adjust at times but there’s no looking back when it comes to building WordPress based products. My workflow is even better than ever. Now let me tell you why you should love PHPStorm.
PHPStorm understands WordPress
As the the tools name implies, it understands PHP, so what? That’s not all. It actually understand WordPress. It can pick up when you’re running a WordPress specific project and it can make suggestions to enhance your project settings to give you the best setup for getting work done.
Its a purpose built tool
Theres no need for plugins. PHPStorm comes with all the tools you need. If you need more tools it has an ad on system through which you can add more plugins.
Project specific terminal
Every project comes with a localised terminal window so you can start bashing out terminal commands from the get go. All this without leaving PHPStorm. If you love using git from the command line this will be one of your favourite features as it easily buys you a few hours extra per month.
Predefined styling Rules
PHPStorm has the WordPress style guide built in so you can get your project inline with core’s coding standards right from the start.
Never forget that TODO comment
If you like making inline comments to leave yourself notes and then forget where you’ve place the todo items you’ll be thrilled to know that PHPStorm remembers this for you. You can filter this by the entire project scope or just a specific file. With this you can track all your todo items across the project without the need for an external system.
Debugging made super easy
No more need for var_dump and echo to find bugs. All you need is to turn on xDebug on your server and link it to PHPStorm. From this point further I guarantee that you’ll speed up finding bugs in your code. This is the main reason for switching over. If you’re still figuring out where your bugs originate without reloading the page and checking the var_dump. Switch over today.
More resources:
- Using PHPStorm: https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/PhpStorm/WordPress+Development+using+PhpStorm
- WordPress support in PHPStorm:
- Debugging: http://thehungrycoder.com/tutorial/wordpress-debugging-in-phpstorm.html
Dwain Maralack 