Stuart Herbert has officially released a plugin for the popular text editor Sublime Text 2 to integrate PHPUnit support directly into the editing environment.

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.

On the ServerGrove blog today there's a new post about using their TranslationEditorBundle (Symfony2) to handle multilingual support for your site.

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.

In a quick new post to his blog, Rob Allen has shared a snippet for the Sublime Text 2 editor to make creating getters and setters for your class simpler (dynamically too).

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.

The PHP documentation team has made a new announcement about some major changes that are happening with the PHP documentation - three interesting new additions to this part of the PHP project.

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.

James Cohen has a recent post to his blog looking at a way you can avoid some of the character encoding problems in PHP that can come with working with multiple character sets.

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.

Thijs Lensselink has a new post to his blog today showing a step-by-step guide to setting up a vim editor environment to provide a richer experience than the plain-text defaults for working with your PHP code.

For my coding work i mostly use Zend Studio. And i am a big fan of this IDE. But i also do a lot of work in the shell. And that asks for at least basic vim knowledge. My colleague is a big vim fan. And does most of his work in vim. So last week i was compiling a cheat-sheet for my self. And came across a slideshow of one of Andrei Zmievski's talks. This slide show got me inspired enough to start playing around with vim a bit. And this is the result of it.

He walks you through everything from scratch - installing vim, setting up some of the configuration files, grabbing some plugins to help with highlighting, adding in ctags for code completion and a plugin to give the editor more of an "IDE feel". There's a few screenshots included in the post as well, so you can be sure your environment is looking the same as his.

Robert Basic has a new post to his blog talking about a new PHP editor/IDE that he's been working on called ape.

I'm writing web applications each and every day, so writing a desktop app requires a different way of thinking and leaving my "comfort zone" (although, I'm quite comfortable in front of the keyboard hackin' away code). ape is written in python and pyqt, but again, it's not about the language used, for me it is about programming.

He's used vim and Netbeans in the past, but didn't quite find what he was looking for, so he started up this project to both learn a different sort of development and hopefully end up with something that does what he needs: grouping files into projects, regex search/replace, code coloring & completion and, of course, file editing

You can find the latest on the ever-evolving project on github.

On PHPBuilder.com today Jason Gilmore has an introductory tutorial to using the popular vim editor for your PHP development with more that just the basic features.

When you choose a streamlined IDE, you forfeit the visual bells and whistles usually found in many commercial products but you gain the ability to write, organize and refactor code as quickly as you can type. For millions of developers around the globe, that IDE is Vim, and in this article I'll show you how Vim can help you to write PHP code faster than ever before.

He starts with the basics - what vim is and how to start it up - and shows how you can use the command-line inside of the editor to do things like a simple search and replace. He also shows how to edit multiple files, set up PHP command completion and how to use the Project plugin to make it easier to find files without having to leave the editor.

If you're looking for more detailed information on using vim in your development, check out this presentation from Andrei Zmievski or these tips from Matthew Weier O'Phinney.

Tobias Schlitt has a quick post to his blog about the release of the phpDocumentor for VIM project he's been working on over to github.

phpDocumentor for VIM (PDV) is a project which resulted from my efforts to create a comfortable programming environment for PHP in the VIM editor. Since the server which hosted the SVN repository is to be switched off the next days, I finally moved development over to github. In addition to that, I seized the chance to rename the project itself to VIP (VIM integration for PHP).

There's a few other goodies in the repository besides just the VIP tool. You can grab some (or all) of the code by following the instructions given on the github page.

In a new post to his blog Davey Shafik goes on a bit more about NetBeans which is quickly becoming his favorite IDE in the series of ones he's tried (including Zend's offering, Eclipse with PDT and his most recent choice NetBeans).

And let me tell you, Netbeans 6.8 is nothing short of amazing. Debugging with xdebug is now almost as easy as ZDE, it works instantly on 90% of my remote machines, but I have 1 cluster for which Netbeans simply *cannot* find the local source file, making it impossible to debug.

Watches, breakpoints (though, I haven't figured out conditional breakpoints, if they are there), callstack and local variables work as you would expect (though watches/variables sometimes refuse to populate larger vars, I think this is xdebug config related). In addition, Netbeans supports arbitrary breakpoint groupings; these can be enabled and disabled as a group - very neat.

He points out the excellent PHPUnit support the IDE has to offer and includes some screenshots of how you can run tests right inside the IDE, displaying code coverage information both at the file and line of code level.