A few days ago we were contacted by Stanislav “Stas” Ustimenko from Codelobster Software, who asked us to take a look at their product, a developers IDE.

For non-experts, IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment: it’s a software application family that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development.

Well, thanks to Stas we had the chance to test Codelobster PHP Edition in its Professional version that, compared to the free one, offers a series of plugins for widely used third-party CMS, frameworks and libraries, such as AngularJS, CakePHP, Drupal, Joomla, jQuery, Laravel, Twig, WordPress, Yii and many others. While these plugins are paid, the IDE is completely free, unlike other commercial products that offer the same plugins.

Once started the application, we noted with pleasure the opportunity to create a project with predefined templates, as shown in the following image.

Then, after you create a project, an additional added value is the capability to set file parsing mode (PHP, CSS, etc … even up to YAML and Blade).

I consider that a good IDE is indispensable for the development of wide projects. For this reason, without going any further, here follows product data sheet sent by the software house.

Free PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript editor (IDE) – Codelobster PHP Edition

For valuable work on creation of sites you need a good comfortable editor necessarily. There are many requiring paid products for this purpose, but we would like to select free of charge very functional and at the same time of simple in the use editor – Codelobster PHP Edition .

Let us consider some important possibilities and advantages of this program:

• All code highlights depending on a type, the also mixed code is thus supported, so the area of HTML will be highlighted as HTML, PHP as PHP, and Javascript as Javascript in a the same file. There is possibility of choice from color schemes, including popular IDEs.
• Powerful autocompletion for HTML, PHP, CSS and Javascript, including HTML5 and CSS3. For PHP the structure of project is fully recognized, and the complete list of methods falls out in the proper places.
• HTML/CSS inspector on the type of Firebug, which allows easily to correlate the selected elements of page with a code and proper style.
• Context help on all supported languages. By pressing F1 key the page with detailed description for current tag, attribute or function will be opened.
• PHP debugger. PHP debugger allows to execute PHP scripts incrementally, watching the values of all variables in every line.
• SQL manager allows to produce all necessary actions with a database – to add, delete, edit a structure and records in tables, to export data, execute SQL queries. Highlighting and autocompletion works for SQL files also.
• Support of FTP allows to work straight with a remote server and to do all necessary changes with files;
• The portable option allows to use editor without the preliminary installation.
• Other useful utilities: pair highlighting, possibility of blocks selection, collapsing, tooltips, navigation on descriptions of functions and included files at withholding of the key of CTRL, viewing of structure of files and project, preview in a browser, book-marks, and all other standard possibilities for work with a code.

Also there are special plugins for work with

• CMS: Drupal, Joomla
• PHP frameworks: CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Symfony, Yii, Laravel
• JavaScript libraries: JQuery, Node.js, AngularJS
• WordPress blogging engine
• Smarty and Twig template engines

Developer: Codelobster Software
Web Site: http://www.codelobster.com/
Language: Chinese, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Turkish
Supported OS: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10