What Tools and Extensions are Critical for Magento Development?

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.

Already there are some great suggestions here. Can everyone please provide links with them all? — clockworkgeek, Jan 05 '11 at 21:20
Adding to clockworkgeek's suggestion, people with low rep can't add links, so if old timers could edit up their posts that'd be great. — Alana Storm, Jan 05 '11 at 22:01

score 30 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 06 '11 at 09:15

30

Personal developer surely need

PHP IDE (Zend Studio, NetBeans or PhpStorm)
LAMP/WAMP on personal development machine
X-Debug as a must
MySQL client (HeidiSQL)
Firefox + FireBug as main browser; Safari 4/5, Chrome, Opera 10, IE 6/7/8/9
SSH Client (PuTTY)
FTP Client and File manager over SSH (WinSCP)
Manuals for PHP, MySQL, Javascript and Prototype
Bug tracking system (Jira)
SVN to keep own revisions and be in touch with future Magento release from at magentocommerce.com
KDiff3 for SVN better sources comparison
Image Viewer (XnView) to work with images from time to time
Password keeper (PwSafe) for all hostings, mysqls and other passwords
Internet access for Q&A, Magento forums and tutorials

No custom extensions are really necessary, X-Debug and own experience help a lot. For beginners Commerce Bug will be helpful.

answered Jan 06 '11 at 09:15

Andrey Tserkus

3,644
17
24

as you are listing common web dev tools then don't forget fiddler for debugging http requests – Anton S Jan 06 '11 at 12:58
1

firebug is enough, fiddler is needed rarely – Andrey Tserkus Jan 06 '11 at 13:59
1

firebug can't debug http calls from flash – Anton S Jan 06 '11 at 15:26
What's vital to one person might be noise to another, it it's always interesting to hear what other people are doing. – Alana Storm Jan 06 '11 at 19:53
Working with Magento you rarely need to debug flash http requests, that's why I said that fiddler is not really needed – Andrey Tserkus Jan 07 '11 at 08:11
+1 for Xdebug being essential – Jonathan Day Feb 17 '11 at 00:22
If you use Xdebug ( and you must :) you will love 'Easy Xdebug' extension for FF or 'Xdebug Helper' for chrom ... those make easy to start debug on one particular page without start from index.php – WonderLand Aug 31 '12 at 09:12
Here is a list of must-have extensions & techniques compilation for Magento debugging & development - http://dploy.in/2012/magento-debugging-and-development/ (its a part of every project at our web agency) – epicwhale Sep 09 '12 at 12:09
here is another one https://github.com/ecoco/magento_profiler maybe you can add it to your answer – Justus Krapp Sep 29 '16 at 16:47

score 8 · Answer 2 · edited Mar 21 '12 at 09:11

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

score 6 · Answer 3 · edited Jan 05 '11 at 22:02

6

ack-grep

Commerce Bug

MageTool

edited Jan 05 '11 at 22:02

Alana Storm

164,128
91
395
599

answered Jan 05 '11 at 21:12

t10u

81
2

Wow, MageTool has come a long way since I saw it last. Need to get into that, thanks for the reminder! – Jonathan Day Feb 17 '11 at 00:21

score 6 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 06 '11 at 03:11

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

ooh, conditional breakpoints! That's the one feature that I really miss in NetBeans... that could tip me over the edge to PhpStorm! — Jonathan Day, Feb 17 '11 at 00:21

score 4 · Answer 5 · answered Jan 05 '11 at 22:59

4

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

Zend Server CE /w Zend Debugger

HeidiSQL

TortoiseSVN

answered Jan 05 '11 at 22:59

B00MER

5,471
1
24
41

1

A bunch of people at the Mallorca conference mentioned PHP Storm as an IDE worth paying attention to. – Alana Storm Jan 05 '11 at 23:03
So far I've been pretty happy with it - It's not as "light weight" as they say it is (Java based after all) and I wish the code completion would pick up on Magento's way of initializing some models and such, anyone coming from NetBeans should feel at home. I'm a huge fan of JetBrains ReSharpper, the insight it provides helped me learn to code better c#, hoping phpStorm will do the same. – B00MER Jan 05 '11 at 23:19

Anton S · Answer 6 · 2011-01-06T08:13:03.660

4

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

edited Jan 06 '11 at 08:13

answered Jan 06 '11 at 06:27

Anton S

12,750
2
35
37

Thanks Anton, this is somewhat off-topic, but could you post any information you have from your experience using Capistrano and specifically setting it up for Magento? – Jonathan Day Mar 14 '11 at 03:27
i made my own cap config file that only uses the ssh push part form capistrano and uses git for deployment so not a really capistrano way to do things but a good wrapper for executing commands over ssh – Anton S Mar 18 '11 at 12:05

score 3 · Answer 7 · answered Jan 05 '11 at 20:59

3

Linux, vim, and custom command line tools to make life easy. Whenever possible, when making changes (like adding model override XML, for instance), I prefer to create a command line tool to do it for me. vim is nice because it is on darn near every server ever, so debugging remotely is about as comfortable as locally. As for linux, the idea of developing without ack/grep and a proper shell is just too much to bear.

answered Jan 05 '11 at 20:59

Joe Mastey

26,809
13
80
104

2

If you're using vim be sure to checkout ctags: http://ctags.sourceforge.net/. Vital for source navigation. – Alana Storm Jan 05 '11 at 21:03
Great tool, thanks for the recommendation – Joe Mastey Jan 06 '11 at 02:39

score 2 · Answer 8 · edited Jan 05 '11 at 22:05

2

Commerce Bug extension from Allan Storm :-)

Aptana/Eclipse for IDE

UltraEdit for quick edits

Wamp

Xdebug

edited Jan 05 '11 at 22:05

Alana Storm

164,128
91
395
599

answered Jan 05 '11 at 21:05

Joe Constant

812
2
13
29

Daniel Espinoza · Answer 9 · 2011-01-05T21:37:56.943

Development

Local setup is MacBook, Coda, MAMP, Navicat to manage MySQL, Git or SVN depending on project.

Staging area is on my development server (LAMP) or on client-provided hosting.

For starting projects I have a base template and module set that includes most of what I put into projects.

Modules

Just started using Alan's Commerce Bug. I plan on looking into MageTool soon.

I use Unirgy's Gift Cert and Store Locator often.

Oscprofessionals · Answer 10 · 2015-06-13T19:45:58.017

0

Commerce Bug by Alan Storm is a Must for all developers.
Developer Toolbar by MGT is another very good tool for Magento analysis.
Netbeans/PHP Storm IDE is recommended.
Git.
LAMP/WAMP.
PhpMyAdmin/ PHPMiniAdmin.
Mage::log and exception Log effective use.
Magento Path Hints.
New Relic.
SQL query log by modifying PDO file.
Module that displays what all blocks delivered from Cache.
Inbuilt Magento Profiler.

edited Jun 13 '15 at 19:45

answered Apr 28 '13 at 07:12

Oscprofessionals

2,161
2
15
17

score 0 · Answer 11 · answered Jan 05 '11 at 22:20

0

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

answered Jan 05 '11 at 22:20

macki

365
2
9

score 0 · Answer 12 · answered Aug 09 '11 at 00:24

I've been using Zend Studio on Ubuntu for a while now and love it. Combining a powerful IDE and command line tools (grep, etc...) has my vote.

On a side note, I've been working on a Magento extension named "Advanced Developer Tools". I use it (a lot!) to get info about blocks and edit XML and PHTML files by clicking on blocks. It's still beta though.

What Tools and Extensions are Critical for Magento Development?

12 Answers12

Linked