The woof and the warp weblog about web stuff.
The tools I use for Joomla! development
I'm designing and programming mainly for Joomla! for many years now, being one of the founders of the project helps a lot with counting years of course :-) and in case you are interested in the tools I use and why I use them I'll list them in this post.
My specialty and passion is creating custom designs/templates for Joomla!, WordPress, Drupal or just plain html sites. For Joomla! I also write components, modules and plugins but because I'm not a guru php programmer I can do that up to a certain level of complexity.
I love creating modules and plugins that give me a special feature and what I like most about writing them myself is the fact that I'm in full control over the markup the module or plugin renders at the front-end of a site.
There is a serious markup problem with many of the extensions created for Joomla! and for the way I build sites I need mean and lean semantic markup so in the rare cases I use 3pd extensions I end up hacking the output or creating overrides.
It's not just the 3pd developers that should pay more attention to the markup their products spit out but Joomla! itself has a huge responsibility concerning this matter. Joomla! core output is still producing many tables and doesn't use H tags for headings to name a simple example and if the core does it that way many 3pd developers just follow this practice.
Hand writing versus wysiwyg.
I write all code by hand, whether this is php, html or css because I just don't trust wysiwyg tools like Adobe Dreamweaver todo exactly what I want. That doesn't say these tools are bad by default but I just like hand writing and I realize this requires a certain level of knowledge that not everyone has or should have.
I have a windows pc and a mac running with different software for different purposes.
The list of tools I use.
My localhost web-server.- Like most people and a requirement for many open source software I'm running a local web-server on Apache with PHP and MySQL.
- For my database management on that server I use PhpMyAdmin.
- I'm working with Joomla! SVN version control on a daily basis to keep up to speed with the changes made to the Joomla! core. For this I use tortoise or command line.
- Ultra Edit Text Editor - this is a pretty plain text editor that has enough features to make live easy. It has good syntax highlighting capabilities and a very important thing is that it save file as UTF8 without BOM.
- I also use Ultra Compare once in a while to compare files for changes that are made.
- Eclipse - a great and very strong tool but in most cases to heavy for the things I do.
- My default browser is Firefox but I also run several versions of Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Chrome and Lynx text-only browser.
- The web developer toolbar - can't do without.
- The accessibility toolbar - can't do without.
- Html validator - can't do without.
- Firebug - can't do without.
- YSlow - useful info provider.
- Operator - for microformats.
- Adobe Fireworks is my buddy.
Now, that's a little sneak peek in my kitchen maybe you find something useful in it.
There are 3 comments posted.
For SVN with Eclipse there is the Subversive Plugin.
http://www.eclipse.org/subversive/. It is a well integrated subversion client Eclipse.
There is also Aptana, which is Eclipse with default plugins for JavaScript development, and PHP development as well. The integration of JavaScript libraries such as MooTools (Joomla1.5 choice), JQuery, ExtJS is very well done in Aptana. Subversive also works on Aptana.
For Database modeling I'd recommend MySQL Workbench.
http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/
It is the successor to DBDesigner, which is great also.
http://fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/
For quick source code editing: Notepad++
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/
I run WAMP on windows, which is Apache, PHP and MySQL as a windows installer (very easy to set up).
http://www.wampserver.com/en/
All free open source software.
It’s great to find such a well laid out article, thanks for sharing information
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# 1 - Posted by: Michael Hamanaka on 2008-09-13 19:33:39
Don't forget project documentation, like all of your usernames and passwords, or any other information. Google Docs works really well while collaborating with clients. The biggest speed bump in dev is the authentication process, the human part of that is obviously the slowest part. I used to write everything on paper and then I would lose them, it is so much easier with secure passwords, especially those generated by cPanel to be cop ad pasted.