Unusually I have found myself with a spare half hour this morning so decided to put it to good use and write a post here. Progress has been slow of late - the only thing that has really changed is the folder layout - I've created a few new folders and moved some files from the site root - the only real use this serves is simply to tidy things up a little. There's basically two new folders - 'javascript' and 'core_files' - both of these should be self explainatary. For those of you who are interested - checkout the latest CVS - you will see a branch called 'new_folder_layout' under the dmcms_080 module - that's the new site layout.

Other worthy things of note are my continued useage of eclipse - some of you may recall that late last year I switched to Linux from Windoze (Ubuntu to be exact) the transition was relatively painless but it did leave me without a linux version of my trusty Ultraedit. Rumors of a Linux port aside it looked like UEdit Studio was not going to find its way over to the dark side and so that left me with little choice than to try something else - that something else was Eclipse with the PDT plugin (which I have installed by using the Pulse Eclipse manager).

For the odd file edits here and there I must admit I use the built in text editor (Gedit) which has syntax highlighting and generally suits me fine but for project based stuff (like DMCMS) I've been using Eclipse.

The integrated CVS client is great - there's not even any need for a key - just put in your password once and the checkout / update process is seamless and uninterrupted. Checking out into a project is very easy - in fact a project can be created when you check the files out if you require. Overall - very easy to use. My only (very small) complaint is that the CVS commands are hidden under a second level in the context menu (Under the 'Team' menu to be precise).

With an active project you might want to set up the Xdebug integrated (free) php debugger - to do so you will need to select Xdebug as the default debugger from the properties menu (accessible under windows > properties) and add in the path to your php executable. A point worthy of note here is that you may not have a php executable if you installed PHP from the repository - you might need to add the command line interface version of PHP - you can easily do this by the following command-(for ubuntu)

sudo apt-get install php5-cli

Obviously replace the php5 with your version - now you should be able to find php5 under Usr/Bin (type 'find php5' in a terminal to list all occurances of php5).

The Xdebug debugger http://xdebug.org/ is an open source project that is now bundled into Eclipse, it is free and thus very obviously a fraction of the price of the Zend version. For those of you who have a license for the Zend product - Eclipse also offers support for this too

With the Xdebug debugger installed and the CVS client up and running I now have a tool of comparible use to Ultraedit Studio for PHP work -for me it's still a bit clunky but then that's probably more to do with the fact that I've been using ultraedit for many years - I'm sure I'l eventually get used to it.

So if you're looking for an alternative to Ultraedit or Ultraedit studio on your Linux / Ubuntu box it is definately worth giving Eclipse with the PDT plugin and the Xdebug debugger a go.