I have been a big fan of the Dreamweaver IDE for many, many years and have still yet to find a better IDE integrated with FTP. I moved to Eclipse a year ago for a PHP project I was working on and found it really easy to use and the intellitype function definition help was so much better than that in Dreamweaver that I decided to  move to Eclipse full time.

I still prefer Dreamweaver for creating HTML (their WYSIWYG is awesome) and the FTP integration is superb but one of the reasons I moved was the version of Dreamweaver I was using didn’t handle SFTP well so I ended up using FileZilla for that anyway so the main reason to keep on Dreamweaver went away.

Eclipse PDT (with PHP extensions) can be downloaded at http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/downloads/

Once installed the biggest headache I found was getting the projects imported from Dreamweaver to Eclipse. So step by step:

Download the project to a local working folder (I use c:\workspace\hostprovider\<site url> but you can use anything).

In Eclipse go to File->New->Project  (do not use new PHP project)

On the ‘Select a Wizard’ page select ‘General->Project’ and click Next

On the next screen give it the project name and then un-check the ‘Use Default Location’ and set the local folder to the correct location and hit the finish button:

Then when the project is imported right click the project – select ‘Configure->Add PHP Support’

 

Which completes importing the PHP files into an Eclipse project.