Thread: Development tools used

gPHPEdit: PHP, formerly the 'Personal Home Page' tools and now the 'PHP Hypertext Preprocessor' (celebrating the hacker tradition of recursive acronyms), is a scripting language for the Web with a gigantic following. It's also ideal for other general-purpose coding chores. Programs for hacking C, HTML and other languages have existed for some time; now PHP is starting to see its own dedicated software, and gPHPEdit is looking notably strong here. What's more, gPHPEdit also provides assisted development for CSS and HTML. It offers syntax highlighting, code completion and also tons of plug-ins to custornise it the way you want it.

Firebug: For any Web developer, there can not be any life without Firebug. Firebug is a free Mozilla Firefox add-on that gives developers a powerful tool to inspect and edit HTML, perfect CSS, or even admire the beautiful code from other
web sites. For many, the add-on has become an indispensable part of website design, development and maintenance.
Firebug provides a Box Model viewer, along with an improved inspector. Click on the HTML tab in the left panel and the Layout tab in the right panel. The Box Model
is displayed on the right while the HTML tree is displayed on the left Start moving through the tree and as you hover over an HTML item, you'll notice the HTML in the browser window will be highlighted. Click on some text in the HTML tree. You can edit the HTML right there in Firebug.
You can even edit the CSS. Firebug provides you the ability to tweak your CSS while looking at the browser, so immediate adjustments can occur while editing the CSS - an excellent feature.
Well, truthfully, Firebug is a Web developer's Swiss army knife and deserves a complete article in itself. And if you are developing or theming for a CMS-such as Drupal,Joomla, WordPress or Blogspot-Firebug is an absolute essential tool. These applications comprise many files, and navigating through this maze can be daunting without a tool like Firebug. The beauty of content management systems is that you need not be a programmer to 'theme' a website, and you can typically do so without ever touching the programming code. But yes, you must be able to identify the controlling CSS to bring your own vision to the screen.

The GIMP: Does it need an introduction?

FileZilla:FileZilla is an FTP client that basically lets you connect to a server that has FTP access enabled. Once connected, it lets you upload and download files and directory structures. It can also perform basic actions like changing the file attributes.
FileZilla can handle multiple transfer threads at the same time. This is especially helpful if you are transferring a lot of little files. It also has a nice keep-alive function that will keep your FTP connection open and available. Since most Web hosts will close the connection after a couple ofrninutes of no activity, this will prevent no end of frustration if you are making a bunch of little tweaks and changes on your site. One gripe with FileZilla is that you cannot have simultaneous connections to multiple servers. I sometimes find this necessary while developing websites, and the only option is to get the files required to the local machine and then move them to the other server. But it is quite cumbersome, and this feature is absolutely desirable.
Browsers (Firefox, Opera, IE, Google Chrome): Yes, I have been booting into Windows pretty regularly. Why? because IEs4Linux proved to be inaccurate in rendering the site's CSS and it was important for me to know how the site fared on IE 6, 7 and 8. Moreover, despite the presence of the open source Webkit-based browser called Arora, it is very basic compared to Chrome and Safari.