Today, what I am going to review, has turned out to be one of the most used and most favorite tool for me. I am a part-time Web designer, and I need to write a lot of code in PHP, HTML and CSS. I use Windows OS as I am not a fan of Mac or Linux. I was in search of a good IDE for a very long time, until I found out CodeLobster PHP Edition.

The best thing about this multifunctional portable IDE is that it is completely free. Previously I was using a tool which costed me over $200, but was still lacking in the most important features that CodeLobster has. Most of the popular IDE’s cost around $300-500. But CodeLobster can offer you everything that most premium IDE’s don’t, and that also for free.

Some of my favorite features of CodeLobster PHP Edition are PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript Autocomplete. So you do not need to remember much, as it will do most of your work automatically. It will just make the PHP project development process smooth and fluid-like. It also has a very powerful PHP Debugger to validate the codes locally. There are many other features like Context and Dynamic Help, SQL Manager, etc.

Some of the CMS, Frameworks and JavaScript Libraries it supports are, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Facebook, Symfony, Smarty, jQuery and more.

The Best Features of CoseLobster PHP Edition

With CodeLobster, developing fully-featured websites with PHP has become faster and simpler. I can now save huge amount of my time on as CodeLobster really makes things easier.

HTML Editor

•  Code Highlighting

This is a very important feature that any IDE should have. It will highlight the tags and attributes accordingly, so as to make your code look clean and easily Debuggable.

•  Pair Highlighting

This is an another very simple yet very important feature it has. When writing long codes, tag mismatch becomes a problem quite often. So, to overcome this, tags are highlighted in different colors to make them easily recognizable.

• Intelligent Autocomplete

An awesome feature that really makes the workflow smooth. It can help you to write code much faster by predicting you with the HTML tags, tag attributes and attribute value. I have seen it saving a lot of time while writing very long codes.

CSS Editor

CSS Editor also has the same features like the HTML Editor, like Code Highlighter. But it has two other important features.

• Brace Highlighting

The Brace Highlighting feature will highlight the pair of braces when the cursor is placed in either the opening or the closing brace. It becomes really helpful to debug your code later.

• Code Collapsing

With Code Collapsing, you can make your code look even more clean and can also make the navigation easy and fast. You can click on the small “-” sign beside every line number to collapse the style properties that you are not currently working on.

PHP Editor

The PHP Editor also has features like Code Highlighting, Pair Highlighting, Intelligent Auto-Complete as we have mentioned before also. But it has some other important features worth mentioning:

• Organizing Files into Projects

You can join various files to create a project. You can create a PHP project easily by providing the base URL, Project Name and location.

• Commenting Code

You can comment either blocks or code or lines of code. You may need to disable a certain block of code (like a function) or need to disable a single line, so you can easily make that line or block of code into a comment, thereby disabling it.

PHP Debugger

This is a feature that I like the most in CodeLobster PHP Edition. It it the feature that is worth mentioning.

• Breakpoint can be added to any line to stop the execution of that specific line. 
• Watch Control is an another feature that comes really handy while debugging any code. You can put variables, objects and expressions in the Watch to monitor their activity while debugging.
• URL Debugging can also be sued to debug URLs.

Lite & Professional Versions

CodeLobster PHP Edition comes in Free, Lite and Professional versions. You can get the free version without paying a single buck. But if you want even more features than you should go for the Lite or the Professional versions. The Lite version is packed with many Advanced features like SQL Manager, Code Validator, Code Formatting, Code Snippets and other features like sorting, converting, etc.

You should definitely go for the Lite version if you want to avail these features. But the Professional version is even more versatile. If you want to work on the frameworks like CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Facebook etc, then you must buy the Professional Version. Only the Professional Version allows you to install additional plugins to work on these frameworks.

Now, with the Professional Version, there comes a whopping discount of 75%. Hurry up, to avail this offer now. Buy it now.