Not too long ago, I built a handful of generators for Laravel, which ease the process of various tasks. Today, thanks to help from Gaurav Narula, we're turning things up a notch with the release of a new Sublime Text plugin that leverages the power of Artisan and the generators from directly within your editor.

They help you get it installed and running and show (via a screencast) the steps to use it when working in your code. Their examples show the creation of resources (all MVC aspects and configurations), working with Artisan commands, migrations and other bits of code.

In this edition I talked with Timothy Boronczyk who is the Managing Editor of the famous PHPmaster.com - which is a network (venture?) of the eminent SitePoint (an online media company). @zaemis is also the co-author of the book "Beginning PHP 6, Apache, MySQL 6 Web Development".

They talk about some of the usual stuff like:

• how he got started with PHP
• what kind of tools and development platform he prefers
• his recommendations to developers just getting started
• people in the PHP community he admires
• what framework he would recommend

Check out the full interview for his answers to these and more.

At first I though Cloud9 would be a simple editor, perhaps a nice showcase of what you can do with HTML5 and some well-written javascript but it quickly became evident that this app was packing a lot of powerful features. [...] Sounds pretty awesome if you think about it. You can even connect you own server via SSH instead of using the build in sandbox (this is a paid feature). Is this the Holy-Grail? Not Really, but it's close. This is a very exciting product that almost reaches holy-grail status, but it falls short in a few key areas.

He includes a little bit about trying to use PHP 5.5 in the Cloud9 editing, and points out that while he was (eventually) able to get the PHP 5.5 alpha compiled, he wasn't able to get things like memcache compiled and working.

The Cloud9 team has done a great job removing the barriers to getting a simple idea out the door. I implemented FizzBuzz in PHP using Composer, PHPUnit, and some SPL interfaces and got it all done , and posted to GitHub in about an hour.

In the case of PHP development, you'll need to add some configuration and plugins to speed up your activities. Most of the responsibilities of an IDE - like testing and version control - are outsourced to the terminal while running Vim; however, there are some tweaks that make writing and editing code faster, along with aiding in discovery classes and methods in a PHP codebase.

He includes settings for your .vimrc to detect and load the right PHP functionality, using Command-T, functionality for autocompletion and the snipMate plugin for managing and using reusable code snippets.

PHP is more than just a language for junior high school kids to learn after they master balancing DIV tags in HTML. It can support enterprise-grade installations and deliver the kind of heavy lifting that brings power plants to their knees. [...] To get a flavor for the latest in PHP programming, I spent some time unpacking the current set of development tools for PHP - eight in all.

The IDEs he sampled were:

• Zend Studio
• PHPStorm
• PhpEd
• phpDesigner
• NetBeans
• Komodo IDE
• CodeLobster
• Aptana Studio

He points out that, while all of these tools have their good and bad things about them, sometimes you don't need something that heavy to get the job done. Sometimes something simpler might do just right. He recommends trying them out on your projects and seeing which is the best fit, though. He thinks that you'd probably "need to be working on a bigger PHP project" before an IDE would become really useful though.

Sublime Text 2 is a new cross-platform text editor that I've recently switched to. It's still in public beta, but already offers better performance (and battery life!) and a better look (fonts that render properly!) than Java-based IDEs such as Netbeans. One thing it didn't have was support for PHPUnit, so I've made a plugin. It's available to install via Package Control.

The plugin allows you to directly create tests for a class using a context menu's "Test This Class" option. You can also run the tests directly from the editor and use either the menu or direct text commands to control it. He's also gathering some other well-used PHP snippets into another related plugin, the Additional PHP Snippets plugin.

We have been working a lot with Symfony2 translations lately (we translated our website to Spanish and we are in the process of translating our control panel too). Dealing with multiple translation files is not difficult, but it takes time, lots of copy & paste. We have found that is quite easy to make mistakes, create duplicate lines, etc... in short, it's messy. To tame the translation chaos we decided to create a simple web based editor to deal with Symfony2 translations. The result is the TranslationEditorBundle and it's publicly available for anyone to use and contribute to.

The bundle gives you a simple web frontend to the translation process, making it a lot simpler to input the different versions of the text as well as determine where any duplication might be happening. It also gives you things like the total number of entries and the number of them missing their translations.

As with a lot of editors, Sublime Text supports snippets which are essentially text expansions of a short phrase into more text. I needed to create a few getXxx() and setXxx() methods for some properties of a class and decided that the easiest way to do this would be with a snippet.

Included in the post is the code you'll need to put into the snippet - a simple find (regular expression based) looks at the currently selected variable and expands out the getter and setter for it. For more information on the Sublime Text 2 editor, see the product's website.

PHP has several [three] new documentation features that the community should be aware of.

They've introduced the following:

• PHP manual pages (man pages) - pman - installed via PEAR
• An enhanced CHM (Windows help) version of the manual with user notes
• The Online Documentation Editor allowing edits from anyone.

Character sets can be confusing at the best of times. This post aims to explain the potential problems and suggest solutions. Although this is applied to PHP and a typical LAMP stack you can apply the same principles to any multi-tier stack.

He includes a "boring history" session (and recommends skipping if you just want the good stuff) that talks a bit about character sets and their history in computer system handling. All that said, he recommends using UTF-8 to ease your character encoding woes. He talks about configuring your editor to support it, making sure your browsers understand it and setting up your MySQL database connection to use it.