Anyone into web designing and stuff would know how time taking it is to create your own web elements, themes, and templates. Learning PHP and creating your own themes and templates can be done but the main drawback most programmers face in designing is that they are unable to find an IDE or internet development environment that is affordable (or free) during the beginning of their career.
This software (IDE, I mean) makes designing easy. It helps a designer like me to test their creation, HTML errors, how the site would fit onto different browsers and lots more. Windows-based IDEs are very costly if you think to buy one from website building companies and cost anywhere from $300-$500.
With a lot of research, I came across codelobster, which is free and the best alternative to any of the costly IDEs around.
What is Codelobster and how can it help you in designing?
Codelobster is a free Windows-based portable IDE that allows you to complete your PHP coding and designing process. You get most of codelobster plugins free while a few others have trial period of 1-30 days based on the plugins. Codelobster supports almost all types of CMS like Drupal, WordPress, and others.Codelobster doesn’t limit itself to just PHP but has powerful PHP debugger.
Features of Codelobster
1) Advanced PHP/HTML/CSS JavaScript autocomplete:Codelobster’s autocomplete feature is perhaps the biggest time saver for coders. Once you begin typing, codelobster takes no time to understand your intent and like we do in search engines it starts predicting the upcoming strings and instances.
2) FTP/FSTP support:
While working with your site, you might not prefer working with local files. Having an FTP support helps codelobster to enable us to directly edit, remove or add new files onto our website.
3) Browser support assistance:
If you are a designer you would surely relate to the fact that we need our creations to be cross browser compatible. Many times we switch browsers or have two or more desktops with different versions of browsers to test this feature.
Codelobster makes this time taking process as fast as talking. It shows the browser support of CSS elements by just hovering on it.
4) Preview of colors:
When you are working with CSS properties codelobster can give you a quick preview of the color that the property is using which again is a quiet helpful deciding factor of time and convenience.
5) Multi CMS support:
As I said earlier, codelobster supports multiple CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Node.js and angular.js to name a few.
6) PHP debugger:
Codelobster’s signature feature is the PHP debugger which is quite powerful. This helps in validation of the codes locally. It auto-detects your current server, configuration settings, and other preferences so that you can debug your codes easily.
What would I like to see more in the upcoming versions?
1) A more sorted help support:
Though codelobster has a very god context help which details the options when you press F1; I would like to see a better help system that could actually clear the doubts that are more complex than the basics.
2) I want to see a MAC version for my friends with Apple computers.
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