PhpStorm 9 was released this week with a slew of improvements and new features for PHP and web developers. The popular IDE is used by more than 300,000 developers and its development team usually puts out one major release per year. Version 8 was released last September with official support for WordPress.
Highlights of version 9 include:
- PHP Language & Editing Experience: Includes postfix code completion for PHP, partial PHP 7 support, advanced code understanding, and other enhancements
- New Debugging Experience: Inline debugger for PHP and debugging workflow enhancements
- Remote Development: Remote edit, PHP Code Sniffer and Mess Detector via remote PHP interpreters
- Many improvements related to frameworks and tools
- A range of new and updated third-party plugins available in the PhpStorm plugin repository
The new inline debugging feature is already a hit with WordPress developers. It lets you view variable values in the source code, next to their usages, without having to switch over to the Variables pane or Debug tool window.
Pretty much in love with @phpstorm 9's inline debugging h/t @jeremyfelt
— Zack Tollman (@tollmanz) July 8, 2015
Auto-recognition of common WordPress global variables (global variable => classname) is also included in the latest release.
Check out the version 9 tour video to see some of the new features in action:
PhpStorm is the best PHP IDE. Pleasure reading WordPress source code in it.