jensen Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

If you've ever installed Apache and phpMyAdmin on Ubuntu 9.04 and you changed the Apache run user and group to your local user (because it's a lot easier when developing that way) you will most likely have encountered a WSOD when loading the phpMyAdmin page.

The reason behind this is that the permissions of those files on your system are no longer correct. Luckily this can easily be solved by changing them back. By default Ubuntu creates a group with the same name as your user so if your user name is foo the group name is most likely also foo. All we need to do is change the group permissions and everything should work again.

I have been using Eclipse PDT for my PHP development on Windows. (And on Linux too, I use Vim for quick and small changes but for the entire project I prefer a complete IDE package.) Apart from missing a decent auto-format feature I quite like it.

Unfortunately Eclipse still suffers from the same problems I encountered when I used it for Java development at school. It's bloated and requires a lot of memory slowing down my computers.

At the end of 2008 NetBeans 6.5 has been release with what seemed to be decent PHP support. Last week I made the change. The only thing I was missing was the ability to define a variable type within a comment.

Example:

In Eclipse this would allow me to use code completion on the $player variable which would come in handy when the object has a few dozen functions and properties. It seems I wasn't the only one missing this and it has been introduced into the next NetBeans version.

If you are looking for an easy cross-platform PHP IDE I can only advise you to give it a try!