What Tools and Extensions are Critical for Magento

Question

We're building a nice little community of Magento experts here. I'm curious what Magento extensions and other software tools (IDEs, editors, etc.) everyone is using to help with their development projects?

Both free and commercial tools are more than welcome.

Answer 1

This list keeps getting longer the more I think about it!

Tools

• Netbeans 6.9 w/ ScratchPad, TailFile, Scan On Demand and Path Tools plugins
• XAMPP w/ Xdebug (Phpmyadmin of course)
• UltraEdit
• SVN (I know, should be on GIT, but just haven't gotten there yet)
• PHPUnit & Selenium
• Assembla.com for team collaboration, issue and time tracking, etc
• Filezilla & PuTTY
• VMWare for browser compatibility and deployment target OS testing
• Chrome w/ Pendule and Developer Tools (preferred for CSS and JS debugging)
• Firefox w/ FireBug, FirePHP, FireDiff, Poster, JSONView, Web Developer, User Agent Switcher, etc.
• OpenOffice Calc for editing CSV because it actually respects the format (unlike other spreadsheet applications that won't be named...)
• FreeCommander
• RegExr Desktop (requires Adobe Air)

Common Magento Extensions

• CommerceBug

  the following extensions are available through Magento-connect

• HM_DeveloperToolbar

• ModuleCreator
• Fontis_Recaptcha
• Fontis_Australia
• Tangkoko_CmsSearch

• TBT_Enhancedgrid and TBT_MassRelater

  occassional use, but recommended:

• Unirgy_Giftcert and Unirgy_StoreLocator

• Yoast_Filter
• Netzarbeiter_GroupSwitcher

Answer 2

• PhpStorm - I used Intellij Idea for Java development so this came naturally, The biggest thing I love about this that I have been wanting for PHP is conditional break points. Huge for Magento when you are trying to debug something in autoload or something where there are hundreds of calls to a method.

• Netbeans - I used to use this before PhpStorm, I feel its much faster to learn and configure then Eclipse, I know most people I work with use Ecplise and SVN I think sucks in it compared to these last two and other tools such as find usages and what not

• I'm on a Mac but on 10.5 so I used Entropy php, but when others in on Snow Leopard come to work I suggest they use Mamp Pro, very powerful for local environment setup. Super quick to get virtual hosts and what not setup, can even use multiple ports and everything.

• Navicat Premium - For database management

• Textmate for quick edits and other types of projects

• Transmit for quick ftp if not using command line, probably the best FTP client ever created

Answer 3

• git for versioning
• capistrano for deployment
• eclipse pdt (tried phpstorm, ranked out due poor project management and non-existent remote editing capabilities)
• xdebug
• zend ce , apc, memcached
• redmine for bugtracking with git integration

Answer 4

Zend Studio or EditPlus

Subversion/svnmerge.py

PHPDoc

PHPUnit

Jira/Confluence for task/bug tracking and project specifications

You can see how to work with Magento using ZendStudio here, in Magento Webinars Archive

Answer 5

1. Commerce Bug by Alan Storm is a Must for all developers.

2. Developer Toolbar by MGT is another very good tool for Magento analysis.

3. Netbeans/PHP Storm IDE is recommended.

4. Git.

5. LAMP/WAMP.

6. PhpMyAdmin/ PHPMiniAdmin.

7. Mage::log and exception Log effective use.

8. Magento Path Hints.

9. New Relic.

10. SQL query log by modifying PDO file.

11. Module that displays what all blocks delivered from Cache.

12. Inbuilt Magento Profiler.

Answer 6

JetBrains PHP Storm 2.0 EAP Builds (They must of named their IDE after you Alan ;) )

Zend Server CE /w Zend Debugger

HeidiSQL

TortoiseSVN