need a forms IDE designer for use with PHP

[ljungers]

Have been searching the web for some type of open source or low cost form IDE designer. Have used Dream Weaver a few times and experimented with a couple of share ware IDE's. I find most to be an over kill for what I wish to do and the learning curve is high.

95% of what I plan on doing is design/layout forms for use with PHP for transaction processing. I'm looking at the learning curve and ease of use. I only need the basic as to text, list, check boxes, radio buttons etc, etc.

Have any of you run across such an IDE or heard of one? I'm open to any suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

[ronverdonk]

Have a look at the PHP Editors site . There you'll find reviews and user tests of many PHP editors and IDEs.

Ronald :cool:

[limweizhong]

Have a look at the PHP Editors site . There you'll find reviews and user tests of many PHP editors and IDEs.

Ronald :cool:

In my opinion, making your own forms without an IDE designer is easy enough, and probably allows for more flexibility.

[ronverdonk]

I don't agree with you at all here. Designing a good web application can be hard work and certainly needs quite a lot of skills. Only question here is: do you want to do it yourself or do you want to use some pre-fabricated building blocks like a lot of the IDE's let you do?

So, instead of putting my money in a full-featured and overpriced IDE, I would rather suggest to you to get a good CSS design book and tutorial and a good CSS editor (such as Top Style).

Ronald :cool:

[ljungers]

Thanks for the several suggestions. I did check out the PHP Editors site and found that most of what I saw dealt with PHP script editors. I do want to use CSS as much as I can so that the application pages all look, feel and act the same.

Have played with dreamweaver and found it way too much for what I need. I did try a package called "Nvu New View" and it was not easy to use and did not work the way I thought it would. I will check into Top Style, like I said I'm willing to pay if it's easy to use. Just want CSS and a click & drag, and set properties, code php and test, or something like that.

Every page/form will run in a intranet and not on the web as this will be a in-house developed business accounting application.

Again thanks for the info from all of you.

[ronverdonk]

While browsing the web found the following CSS editor from CoffeeCup. Have a look, it is not free! bit it gives a trial period so you can see if it is what you are looking for. See StyleSheet Maker

Ronald :cool:

[astrologer]

From free available php editors that I know I can suggest Codelobster php Edition (find it here:

www.codelobster .com) as handy and full enough.
All for normal work with code, an intelligent autocomplete. Easy navigation through the project. And the main

feature is debugger. I've tried also Zend. Good, all for php development, but big and there is problems with

setup. Try both.
I've forgotten, Zend isn't free (300$).

[nathj]

Hi there,

If I may wade in with my 2 cents worth.

It seems that you are after a WYSIWYG type editor. The trouble with these, from my experience, is the code they produce is awful. It is not optimised, rarely uses CSS and is hardly ever standards compliant. The results is that the site won't look the same over all browser, may not necessarily be visually consisten with itsefl and will probably take up more soom on the server than is really required.

If you wish to use a simple editor for all web development I recommend AceHTML. It has a freeware option and Pro version which you have to pay for but it is not expensive - €69.95.

I picked up in minutes having never used it before and I keep finding helpful things in it. It will do code completion, it will do object traversing, it will allow for standard code snippets and custom code snippets.

Take a look at the site (linked above) and maybe have a play around. This is just my opinion and as you have seen there are lots of them out there.

Cheers
nathj