It seems that my endless search for the ideal PHP IDE has finally…er…ended. phpDesigner 2008 is the most promising environment I’ve seen and even though I’ve only just started using it, it’s already seen Zend Studio Pro and the treacle-like Zend Studio Eclipse confined to the recycle bin.

Remarkably, phpDesigner is the work of one man, Michael Pham from Denmark who’s put it together (perhaps even more remarkably) in Delphi. phpDesigner has lots of productivity tools designed to make coding more efficient, it incorporates tools for editing related technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript and is one of the few tools that, through its excellent syntax tools, built in manuals and code snippets, helps newcomers to learn PHP.

And perhaps the best news is the price (less than forty quid including VAT). There’s a trial version available at http://www.mpsoftware.dk and the product is being actively developed with a beta version currently downloadable for all registered users.

It’s not often that I come across a piece of software like this that blows me away with its quality and value. I’ve been struggling with Zend’s reasonably featured but unresponsive products and had switched to the (also excellent) Ultraedit but phpDesigner looks like being my IDE of choice, at least for now.