Hi all,
I've currently evaluating PHPed, I have a couple of questions:

1) Is there anyway to get the debugger to work with PHP5? I read the howto on the FAQ but I can't download the package "NuSphere-phped-3.3-php-5.0.1-Win32.exe", I think because I'm not a customer (... yet).

2) I can't find a suitable project management program to use along with PHPed. I used to use Dreamweaver MX and it has nice project management built in but PHPed (along with every single other PHP IDE I tried and I tried a lot) doesn't offer a lot and displays what it does offer rather confusingly. Also, the versioning integration is with CVS which I can't understand. Now, I don't mind the lack of project stuff - that's simply not what PHPed is about. However, I can't find a suitable program to use along side PHPed with features like:

• Project declaration again of course.
  
• Several (S)FTP/FS locations for uploading/downloading files to and from the various testing servers that my project might have.
  
• Synchroizing capabilities to allow me to upload/download only files that have changed since I last got them.
  
• The ability to store information on files such as notes about what needs done and what's not working correctly.
  
• Check in/out to allow multiple developers to use it without problems.
  
• Some sort of versioning system would be nice too as long as it makes sense to little me
  

you can download it from the site for evaluators
http://www.nusphere.com/eval/
(actually we've already released 5.0.2)

What do you mean ? in details please.


Yet phped supports only one publishing location... To publish to other locations you can add multiple projects to the same workspace. Each should point to its very own server and the same local (development) directory.


See Smart Sync->Upload and Smart Sync->Download


Not yet implemented in PHPED. Take a look at CVS, it supports notes/comments.


Enable CVS in the project settings and set up shared CVS repository to be used by all developers.


Fully supported by CVS.

Thanks for the quick reply.

I missed the evaluation download, thank you. I was worried about this as I'm looking to move to making PHP5 only scripts and a good debugger is important. I still don't understand how to use it but I'm sure that will come to me.

By project declaration, I just mean that this project management software would need to have a projects feature with the ability to set a project home directory and such like as I wouldn't expect it to be able to tie into PHPed or Dreamweaver or whatever. It never occured to me to have multiple projects in one workspace all pointing to the same local directory - I was wondering what the point of workspaces was but I guess that explains it.

I suppose I should just figure out how to use CVS. It seems like the industry standard anyway.

EDIT: Is there any way to define an account like an FTP but that is a local/network directory, so I can upload/download as if it was FTP? I have a fully featured testing server on my machine and it would be handy if I didn't have to use Explorer to move files around.

File->New Project menu creates new project and opens settings for it where you can assign project root (home) directory and publishing account (either FTP or WEBDAV). You will find button with [...] next to account dropdown which opens account settings dialog. Shouldn't be so hard.

I know how to do it in PHPed, I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. I just meant that if I was to use another program for project management, I'd need it to also have this sort of feature. Is there no way to create a filesystem account to have something a bit handier than having 2 Windows explorer windows open and copy and pasting between them?

I'm sorry if I didn't realize what you mean...
"File system account" is a new feature to me... Could you share the idea with me ? At least operating system (Windows) does not support this feature in its core. All the rest stuff comes with other software that we can't rely on... You see.

It's simply faking an FTP account using the operating system's own file system. You'd set up an account like an FTP account except you give a directory on your local machine (or over window's networking) instead of the FTP address and root directory (eg. for me, I'd enter "E:\Server\www\projectName") and you'd set a project to use this account like you would with an FTP account. Then when you hit Ctrl+Shift+S to save and upload, PHPed copies it to the logical place off the given account directory.

This would be handy for me because as well as PHPed's internal debugger, I run a testing Apache2 server with all the bits and pieces I need like PHP 5.0.2, MySQL 4 and so on. This feature would allow me to "upload" a change to this testing server (without having to waste resources on an FTP server). I don't want to set my project to use the testing directory in the server as I perfer to keep seperate copies - more backup if things go wrong and unlike a seperate backup somewhere otherwise unused, I'm forced to keep it up-to-date as I have to update it to see my changes.

That's clear. Thanks for the explanation.
Yet, PHPED 3.3 does not support such kind of publishing... But you can easily accomplish desired behaviour by running external software (for example your own php script or even batch file) using Customization feature. You can add new menu item to Workspace popup and have your script running with all necessary arguments supplied (such as directory and file names). This script should take arguments and copy files from one location to another...
For a sample on how such script can be added and run from the IDE, take a look at PhpDocumentor menu. It's nothing more but an external script.