5 Every day Tools to Power up Your PHP development life cycle

As all PHP developers would vouch, a development project is replete with multiple areas to focus on – at the same time! With a constant eye on quality, we also need to put efforts to see that the project is being executed smoothly, is on track amongst all team members, and is following all the deadlines set up with the client company. This makes the life of a PHP developer a tough one.

However, not all is lost!

With the advent of seamless collaboration across developers and technological advancements, the online community today provides a lot of tools and techniques to bring down the efforts put on mundane yet critical tasks and instead let you focus on what you love doing best – i.e. programming. Today we present a roundup of some essential tools that PHP developers like you and me would hate to ignore.

Here we go…

1. Pivotal Tracker (for Project Management) – The agile project management tool has remained a perennial favorite with PHP developers for an end to end project management. Ever since its debut in 2008, it has added various exciting features to make the life of a developer easier. It allows seamless micromanagement, prioritization and workflow management of a project, minus the hassles associated with collaboration and scheduling across teams. From the all-encompassing project view to ‘stories’ that form the building block of the project, it has all this and more.
2. Eclipse (for development) – All developers need a base workspace in the form of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and what better IDE than the leaders themselves?

Yes, we are talking about Eclipse

While the IDE can help in development using a wide variety of programming languages, with the right set of plug-ins, PHP development can turn to a breeze. With amazing extensibility, developing web applications in PHP is simpler and much more fun.

3. Laravel (Framework for PHP) – A truly modern framework, Laravel has quickly emerged as the favorite framework for PHP developers worldwide

It makes PHP fun to code and easy to work!

Along with Composer Package that is standard with Laravel version 4 onwards, dependency management becomes silk smooth. No need to install an entire framework to use just one of its offerings. Even user authentication becomes easier with Laravel providing a simple, effective and easy to use interface for validating user credentials.

Like to read more about Laravel and more about how we use it in our own development? Check those links you have already come across.

4. Git (for Version Control) – Trust me, having a team brings up its own set of problems with collaboration and integration. For projects across scale, size and team strength, Git’s open source distributed version control system makes changes across different batches easier to maintain. With Git, distributed, collaborative development of PHP source code. No matter if your team is across different locations or in the same office, your QA and due diligence are now more transparent and secure.

5. Mantis (for Bug Tracking) – The open source issue tracker is a godsend for developers who focus on the quality of the programming code. New developers can get going within minutes of exploring the full-featured bug tracking system. In spite of its simplicity, it offers amazing versatility and tremendous power. Written in PHP, it supports a range of databases such as MS SQL, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. It not only eliminates bugs, but also provides a collaboration and project tracking feature.

The above tools are few, which we use in Macronimous. Find any other tools in your arsenal that makes your life simpler each day with PHP? Do write  to us your comments and let us know.