I'm using PHPed since about 3-4 years now and I renew my maintenance every year.
In my opinion PHPEd is (and will hopefully be) the best IDE for PHP out now.

But, honestly, some things give me some thought.

1. Maintenance
The website (nusphere.com) wasn't maintained since months.
Every month they have a "Holiday sale" with "sale ends on januray, february, march,...".
All "sales" are always delayed, currentyl "Sale ends Friday March 5-th".

2. Support
The support lacks, I mean they don't answer.
I've a support ticket unanswered since 2 weeks.

3. PHPEd updates
As far as I know we've got 2-3 updates since several months.
But, the updates consisted only of some "rolebacks", bugfixes and some shady feature requests.

4. Requested features
The majority of requested features were not heard. Especially
a better JavaScrip-Support and other requests.

I really love PHPEd for it's performance and usability, but
the web goes on and will never have a break.

Just my 2 cents.

I'm personally a huge PhpED supporter, you can probably see that in the amount of msgs I posted here in the course of the years.
However (and to my regret) I have to agree with you on all the points. I even started looking at other editors again since a couple of weeks.
To be honest, if it were easier to get the debugging working on any of the other editors out there I would probably consider switching.

Imho PhpED has been the lead editor for years, but the lack of news and communication is starting to worry me. I'm not so sure where PhpED is headed anymore and I like my code editor to be up to date on the latest technologies.

Perhaps they are concentrating all manpower on a huge update and our minds will be blown? Unfortunately it has been a steady trend downwards lately regarding communication, so I'm a bit afraid that that is not the case.

NuSphere, if you are reading this, feel free to correct me and give me a scolding!

unfortunately i'm not even sure what IDE to go to. i've tried Zend, i *hate* eclipse's stupid connectors/containers for every single thing, i just feels so clunky (didn't manage to get their ftp support working), and none of the others seem to be comparable.

the auto-complete is wonderful, git/svn integration (workplace still uses svn unfortunately) would be awesome, better js support, but no one seems to have that.

i'll stick with phped for now, but it definitely looks like its dying?

It's hard to read this when I've just bought professional licence of PHPEd ,... I hope it will turn out in good way for all PHPEd users.

I'll stick with PHPEd too, but I've also looked in the last 1-2 months at almost a dozen other
IDE's and, as far as I can say, there's currently not a single one that could compete with PHPEd in the
range of usability and speed. Also it has never been easier to debug source code.

From this point, I wouldn't currently say that PhpED is dying.

Although PHPEd is in my opinion still the best IDE for PHP at the moment, unfortunately today it is no
longer sufficient to only use HTML and PHP. Today's web development consists of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML,
several Frameworks (JS, PHP,...) and more - and this is the area where PHPEd slowly but surely can not keep up
with some other IDE's.

I hope every day that Nusphere tells us that something new is coming soon.

Or as "Blizz" said:
"Perhaps they are concentrating all manpower on a huge update and our minds will be blown?"

Personally I'm content with it as long as they get the current bugs worked out and add at least one more of my feature requests in (code folding on arrays!)

Sure it could be better, but its still better than all the other crap thats out there in my opinion.

It would be great to have some info from someone on the dev team.

One thing is that I notice the same feature requests coming up again and again in the forum. I wouldnt expect most of them to be implemented any time soon (although it would be nice to see new added features...), but some feedback to the community on what the dev team think are good / bad ideas, and whether they plan to add them to the Roadmap - would at least help us to know that there IS a roadmap.

Re support I havent used it for a while, but when I did I always got very quick repsonses. If response time is going up then either support requests are going up a lot, or something is changing behind the scenes.

The feature requests from the forum are (were?) being used for sure.
Some time ago (september) feedback was asked from all the beta participants: Scoring of a list of features extracted from here for importance.
A result sheet was created later on with all the given scores and most of the features had a background color. I can only assume that the green features were approved for PhpED 6.

I would publish the list here were it not for the fact that I'm not sure if it would be allowed. I'm going to lean towards a no and not risk it.

Anyway, my assumption a couple reactions ago that they perhaps were busy on that new version was largely based on that and some other stuff. I remain optimistic about it, though slightly scared about the lack of communication.

Hey Everyone,

I'm with everyone of you on most points - PhpEd has been a 'Best In Field' editor for a long time, but as many users have pointed out, they've really lost their edge. They're unresponsive to support requests, and if you don't agree with the lead developer's position, he becomes arrogant and defensive - personalizing consumers opinions is just bad for business. Here are a couple of other points:

- Between products, basic files are not kept up to date. I use PhpDock and PhpEd, and earlier today I downloaded them both and did some file comparisons (I was having an issue with sqlite). There are many non-NuSphere files in both apps that are different, and PhpEd itself is not shipping with the latest stable version of the sqlite3.dll. (current version shipping with PhpEd - 3.6.10 - this version was released 8/6/08, current stable release from sqlite.org is 3.6.18 released 3/9/10. There have been NINETEEN VERSIONS released since Nusphere has done an update). There are MANY other files that are not current in PhpEd. Even the php_sqlite.dll versions are different between dock an PhpEd, and there is no sqlite3 driver shipping with Dock at all - there was a post saying to use PDO, but that's pretty pretentious - developers should be able to choose what to use, not be told what to use, especially when the product (dock) can support the requested feature. It just seems incredibly lazy.

A couple of years ago, I found a bug with ssleay32.dll. I could reproduce the crash at will, spent hours demonstrating the issue to the NuSphere support team, found a more current, official release that documented the bug and its fix, and the final reply from NuSphere was (I paraphrase), 'Well, no one else is having the issue, so we're not changing it." I created a post to help other users that might encounter the same problem (didn't even mention the contention I had with the support team) and it was promptly deleted. Created it again thinking maybe a mistake had been made - deleted again. It weas over a year before they updated to the version that I identified. Sad, really.

- Products themselves are not kept current. With Dock, I was trying to catch an exception that was being thrown and I found a post in the Dock forums that basically said, "We have a lot to do with all of our products, so we have to prioritze." That would be fine if there was a problem with Dock itself, but it was an issue with keeping non-Nusphere files up-to-date, not rewriting Dock code. Besides, if the team can't keep their 3 or 4 products current, they sdhould pull the products they can't keep up with and 'stick to the knitting', as it were. If I buy a program, I expect the developers to keep up with it. It's not as if the products are being sold as beta versions.

"Personally I'm content with it as long as they get the current bugs worked out and add at least one more of my feature requests in (code folding on arrays!)
Sure it could be better, but its still better than all the other crap thats out there in my opinion."

This is exactly what they seem to be counting on - you'll keep using the product because nothing better has come along....yet. As always, the commercial software market is ever-evolving. NuSphere has built up some pretty ill-will at this point, and I think they underestimate the number of users who will bolt as soon as a better editor comes along, even if the editor is missing a few features but is responsive to consumers like NuSphere used to be.

In summary (oh, I don't know if other users have this issue, but even trying to post here is tough - the window keeps scrolling back up while I'm typing and I can't see what I'm entering), NuSphere just doesn't seem to care anymore. There's a post in the Dock forums from JANUARY 10 that is unanswered - first post in the forum that's not a sticky.

Another editor WILL pop up that is full-featured, has a team that responds to consumer concerns, and will be in a position that NuSphere can't catch up with given their current support/response method. Color me 'gone' the day that happens - NuSphere has simply become too much of a hassle to deal with anymore.

PhpEd is on Build 5932. It's a single app. Windows is on Build 7600, and that spans years of development, millions of lines of code, and frequent updates. Something seems wrong with this picture.

Oh, another note: The newest release of the debugging module (.so for 64-bit *nix - RedHat in my case) throws an error. I've tried the install that I've been doing for years, but to no avail - I had to roll back to an earlier debugging module. My users expect comprehensive testing on multiple platforms befiore I hand them software - NuSpere should give that a try, as it is incredibly frustrating to spend the time trying to install an 'update' and it not work. My server's installation is so basic that there really is no way the debugger was tested thoroughly prior to release.

Dmitri, you had a hell of an app, offered great support, and had/have a chance to dominate this market. Php continues growing rapidly, so the market is only getting bigger.

I'll keep most of my opinions to my self, but comparing PhpEd to Windows is stupid.

NuSphere - million dollar company (if that).. "few" developers.
Microsoft - billion dollar company.. more developers and resources than you can imagine. Its no wonder they can provide a consistent update schedule.

I think you've actually highlighted the intended point - that for its size phpEd has hit a remarkably high number of builds. I'm not saying I do (or don't) share LovinItAlls point of view on that - just pointing out that I think you missed the... er... point!

@LovinItAll - I've had a forum post magically disappear overnight as well... I wonder if there may be more casualties shortly.

@Blizz - hope you're right ! Would be great to find the upgrade offer to version 6 in an email in the near future, with a huge wishlist of new features!

I don't have any issues really to date - maybe I'm not enough of a power user to run in to some of the issues people have described - it would be great to have a bit more comms though.

Dear Nusphere Users!
You are right on the main point - we probably neglected to communicate with the community, and it of course causes concern and disappointment.
So first of all we'd like to re-assure that we're not dying, we're moving forward, we're in business and hope to be in business for many years.
We hope that we proved that by releasing 5.9 version with full support of PHP 5.3, including code completion for namespaces, which even Zend was unable to provide. And we released it in a few months after PHP 5.3 official release. So we're very much alive.
If there are any issues with the support tickets not answered in reasonable amount of time (usually we're trying to reply within 24 hours), we're very sorry, it happens very infrequently. Dear Onc, please don't hesitate to ping us by replying to the email with the ticket id and kick us in the rear end - it's definitely unusual for us not to reply for 2 weeks, it's a shame, and we take full responsibility for it. But again, we'd like to mention that it's very rare case.
We'd like to respectively disagree with the statement that "we've got 2-3 updates since several months".
Version 5.9 is less then 6 months old, and if you look at http://www.nusphere.com/news/changes59.htm, you'll see that we released many updates, both with bug fixes our community reported and some minor feature requests. And the latest build 5936 was released fairly recently.
Of course major features can not be added to the 5.9, our development is working on the next major version, although we can't provide the time line as of now.
And to quickly address the point made by LovinItAll regarding products not up-to-date - usually we ship the latest stable version of third-party product, which is compatible with other modules, etc. So there could be different reasons not to ship the latest version, depending on the compatibility, functionality, and even licensing - for instance you all know that we can't ship the latest mysql client dll due to the mysql licensing policy, and users need to download it. If there are specific concerns, then the best way to get an answer is to contact our support.
We hope that all of you guys will continue to enjoy working with our product and remain happy Nusphere users for many years to come.
Best regards,
Nusphere Customer Care.