PhpStorm is a full-featured IDE that has somewhat of a cult following among WordPress developers. Made by JetBrains, it’s notable for being more light-weight than most IDEs, web development specific (though not just PHP as the name implies), and very customizable.
Today, they’ve announced that PhpStorm will begin officially supporting WordPress project management. WordPress-specific features include:
- WordPress integration in PhpStorm for new plugins (with plugin skeleton) and existing projects
- Development environment configuration for WordPress
- Hooks support (Completion for registration functions parameters; Navigation from hook registration functions to hook invocation; Callbacks from hook registration; and other hooks-related features)
- Search WordPress.org right from the editor
- WPCLI integration
They also link to a complete tutorial on using PhpStorm with WordPress. The tutorial includes screenshots as well as text. All of the above features are available to those in their Early Access program, and will be fully baked into version 8.
Those that are familiar with using a full IDE will probably get along just fine with PhpStorm. Those that primarily use text editors like Notepad++ or Sublime Text or Coda may be overwhelmed at first. There are many advantages of using an IDE, but they’ve historically been plagued for being slow and complicated. PhpStorm works hard to not be. Along with the above-linked tutorial, there is also a paid tutorial called Make PhpStorm Pretty by Jeffrey Way (formerly of Envato).