50 Extremely Useful PHP Tools

PHP is one of the most widely used open-source server-side script­ing lan­guages that exist today. With over 20 mil­lion indexed domains using PHP, includ­ing major web­sites like Face­book, Digg and Word­Press, there are good rea­sons why many Web devel­op­ers pre­fer it to other server-side script­ing lan­guages, such as Python and Ruby.

PHP is faster (updated), and it is the most used script­ing lan­guage in prac­tice; it has detailed doc­u­men­ta­tion, a huge com­mu­nity, numer­ous ready-to-use scripts and well-supported frame­works; and most impor­tantly, it’s much eas­ier to get started with PHP than with other script­ing lan­guages (Python, for exam­ple). That’s why it makes per­fect sense to pro­vide the huge com­mu­nity of PHP devel­op­ers with an overview of use­ful tools and resources that can make their devel­op­ment process eas­ier and more effective.

This post presents 50 use­ful PHP tools that can sig­nif­i­cantly improve your pro­gram­ming work­flow. Among other things, you’ll find a plethora of libraries and classes that aid in debug­ging, test­ing, pro­fil­ing and code-authoring in PHP.

You may also want to take a look at the fol­low­ing related posts:

• 50 Extremely Use­ful And Pow­er­ful CSS Tools
• 15 Help­ful In-Browser Web-Development Tools

Debug­ging Tools

• Web­grind
  Web­grind is an Xde­bug pro­fil­ing Web front end in PHP 5. It imple­ments a sub­set of the fea­tures of kcachegrind, installs in sec­onds and works on all plat­forms. For quick ‘n’ dirty opti­miza­tions, it does the job.
• Xde­bug
  Xde­bug is one of the most pop­u­lar debug­ging PHP exten­sions. It pro­vides a ton of use­ful data to help you quickly find bugs in your source code. Xde­bug plugs right into many of the most pop­u­lar PHP appli­ca­tions, such as PHPEclipse and phpDesigner.
• Gubed PHP Debug­ger
  As the name implies, Gubed PHP Debug­ger is a PHP debug­ging tool for hunt­ing down logic errors.
• DBG
  DBG is a robust and pop­u­lar PHP debug­ger for use in local and remote PHP debug­ging. It plugs into numer­ous PHP IDE’s and can eas­ily be used with the com­mand line.
• PHP_Debug
  PHP_Debug is an open-source project that gives you use­ful infor­ma­tion about your PHP code that can be used for debug­ging. It can out­put pro­cess­ing times of your PHP and SQL, check the per­for­mance of par­tic­u­lar code blocks and get vari­able dumps in graph­i­cal form, which is great if you need a more visual out­put than the one given to you by print_r() or var_dump().
• PHP_Dyn
  PHP_Dyn is another excel­lent PHP debug­ging tool that’s open-source. You can trace exe­cu­tion and get an out­put of the argu­ment and return val­ues of your functions.
• MacGDBp
  MacGDBp is a live PHP debug­ger appli­ca­tion for the Mac OS. It has all the fea­tures you’d expect from a fully fea­tured debug­ger, such as the abil­ity to step through your code and set breakpoints.

Test­ing and Opti­miza­tion Tools

• PHPUnit
  PHPUnit is a com­plete port of the pop­u­lar JUnit unit test­ing suite to PHP 5. It’s a tool that helps you test your Web application’s sta­bil­ity and scal­a­bil­ity. Writ­ing test cases within the PHPUnit frame­work is easy; here’s how to do it.
• Sim­pleTest
  Sim­pleTest is a straight­for­ward unit-testing plat­form for PHP appli­ca­tions. To get up and run­ning with Sim­pleTest quickly, read through this prag­matic tuto­r­ial that shows you how to cre­ate a new test case.
• Sele­nium
  Sele­nium Remote Con­trol (RC) is a test tool that allows you to write auto­mated Web appli­ca­tion UI tests in any pro­gram­ming lan­guage against any HTTP web­site using any main­stream JavaScript-enabled browser. It can be used in con­junc­tion with PHPUnit to cre­ate and run auto­mated tests within a Web browser.
• PHP_CodeSniffer
  PHP_CodeSniffer is a PHP 5 script for detect­ing con­for­mance to a pre­de­fined PHP cod­ing stan­dard. It’s a help­ful tool for main­tain­ing uni­form cod­ing styles for large projects and teams.
• dBug
  dBug is ColdFusion’s cfDump for PHP. It’s a sim­ple tool for out­putting data tables that con­tain infor­ma­tion about arrays, classes and objects, data­base resources and XML resources, mak­ing it very use­ful for debug­ging purposes.
• PHP Pro­file Class
  PHP Pro­file Class is an excel­lent PHP pro­fil­ing tool for your Web appli­ca­tions. Using this class will help you quickly and eas­ily gain insight into which parts of your app could use some refac­tor­ing and optimization.

Doc­u­men­ta­tion Tools

• php­Doc­u­men­tor
  php­Doc­u­men­tor (also known as php­doc and php­docu) is a doc­u­men­ta­tion tool for your PHP source code. It has an innu­mer­able amount of fea­tures, includ­ing the abil­ity to out­put in HTML, PDF, CHM and XML Doc­Book for­mats, and has both a Web-based and command-line inter­face as well as source-code high­light­ing. To learn more about php­Doc­u­men­tor, check out the online man­ual.
• PHP DOX
  An AJAX-powered PHP doc­u­men­ta­tion search engine that enables you to search titles from all PHP doc­u­men­ta­tion pages.

Secu­rity Tools

• Securim­age
  Securim­age is a free, open-source PHP CAPTCHA script for gen­er­at­ing com­plex images and CAPTCHA codes to pro­tect forms from spam and abuse.
• Scav­enger
  Scav­enger is an open-source, real-time vul­ner­a­bil­ity man­age­ment tool. It helps sys­tem admin­is­tra­tors respond to vul­ner­a­bil­ity find­ings, track vul­ner­a­bil­ity find­ings and review accepted and false-positive answered vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, with­out “nag­ging” them with old vulnerabilities.
• PHP-IDS
  PHP-IDS (PHP-Intrusion Detec­tion Sys­tem) is a simple-to-use, well-structured, fast and state-of-the-art secu­rity layer for your PHP-based Web application.
• Pixy: PHP Secu­rity Scan­ner
  Pixy is a Java pro­gram that per­forms auto­matic scans of PHP 4 source code, aimed to detect XSS and SQL injec­tion vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. Pixy takes a PHP pro­gram as input and cre­ates a report that lists pos­si­ble vul­ner­a­ble points in the pro­gram, along with addi­tional infor­ma­tion for under­stand­ing the vulnerability.

Image Manip­u­la­tion and Graphs

• PHP/SWF Charts
  PHP/SWF Charts is a pow­er­ful PHP tool that enables you to cre­ate attrac­tive Web charts and graphs from dynamic data. You can use PHP scripts to gen­er­ate and gather data from data­bases, then pass it to this tool to gen­er­ate Flash (SWF) charts and graphs.
• pChart – a chart-drawing PHP library
  pChart is a PHP class-oriented frame­work designed to cre­ate aliased charts. Most of today’s chart libraries have a cost; this one is free. Data can be retrieved from SQL queries or CSV files or can be man­u­ally provided.
• WideIm­age
  WideIm­age is a PHP library for dynamic image manip­u­la­tion and pro­cess­ing for PHP 5. To be able to use the library, you should have the GD PHP exten­sion installed on your Web server.
• Mag­ick­Wand For PHP
  Mag­ick­Wand For PHP is a PHP mod­ule suite for work­ing with the ImageMag­ick API, which lets you cre­ate, com­pose and edit bitmap images. It’s a use­ful tool for quickly incor­po­rat­ing image-editing fea­tures in your PHP applications.

PHP Code Beautifier

• PHP_Beautifier
  PHP Beau­ti­fier is a PEAR pack­age for auto­mat­i­cally for­mat­ting and “beau­ti­fy­ing” PHP 4 and PHP 5 source code.
• PHP­Code­Beau­ti­fier
  PHP­Code­Beau­ti­fier is a tool that saves you from hours of refor­mat­ting code to suit your own way of pre­sent­ing it. A GUI ver­sion allows you to process files visu­ally; a command-line ver­sion can be batched or inte­grated with other tools (like CVS, Sub­Ver­sion, IDE, etc.); and there is also an inte­grated tool of PHPEdit.
• GeSHi – Generic Syn­tax High­lighter
  GeSHi is designed to be a sim­ple but pow­er­ful high­light­ing class, with the goal of sup­port­ing a wide range of pop­u­lar lan­guages. Devel­op­ers can eas­ily add new lan­guages for high­light­ing and define eas­ily cus­tomiz­able out­put formats.

Version-Control Sys­tems

• Phing
  Phing is a pop­u­lar project version-control sys­tem for PHP. It is a use­ful tool for orga­niz­ing and main­tain­ing dif­fer­ent builds of your project.
• xinc
  xinc is a con­tin­u­ous inte­gra­tion server version-control sys­tem writ­ten in PHP 5 (i.e. con­tin­u­ous builds instead of nightly builds). It works great with other sys­tems such as Sub­ver­sion and Phing.

Use­ful Exten­sions, Util­i­ties and Classes

• Sim­plePie
  Sim­plePie is a PHP class that helps you work with RSS feeds. Check out the online RSS and Atom feed reader, which demon­strates a sim­ple Web appli­ca­tion that uses SimplePie.
• HTML Puri­fier
  HTML Puri­fier is a standards-compliant HTML fil­ter library writ­ten in PHP. HTML Puri­fier not only removes all mali­cious code (bet­ter known as XSS) with a thor­oughly audited, secure yet per­mis­sive white list, it also makes sure your doc­u­ments are standards-compliant. Open source and highly customizable.
• TCPDF
  TCPDF is an open-source PHP class for gen­er­at­ing PDF documents.
• html­SQL
  html­SQL is a unique tool. It is a PHP class for query­ing HTML val­ues in an SQL-like syn­tax. Check out the live demon­stra­tion of how html­SQL works.
• The Great­est PHP Snip­pet File Ever (Using Quick­text for Notepad++)
  “A lit­tle some­thing for all coders: a snip­pets file that I use for PHP cod­ing. This is designed to be used with Quick­text for Notepad++, but feel free to adapt it to what­ever text edi­tor you prefer.”
• Cre­ole
  Cre­ole is a data­base abstrac­tion layer for PHP5. It abstracts PHP’s native database-specific API to cre­ate more portable code while also pro­vid­ing devel­op­ers with a clean, fully object-oriented inter­face based loosely on the API for Java’s JDBC.
• PHPLinq
  LINQ is a com­po­nent that adds native data query­ing capa­bil­i­ties to PHP using a syn­tax rem­i­nis­cent of SQL. It defines a set of query oper­a­tors that can be used to query, project and fil­ter data in arrays, enu­mer­able classes, XML, rela­tional data­bases and third-party data sources. [<a href=“http://phpimpact.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/30-useful-php-classes-and-components/” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘http://phpimpact.wordpress.com’]);”>via]
• PHP­Math­Pub­lisher
  With Php­Math­Pub­lisher, you can pub­lish math­e­mat­i­cal doc­u­ments on the Web using only a PHP script (no LaTeX pro­grams on the server and no MathML).
• php­MyAd­min
  If you’re work­ing with PHP, there’s a big chance you’re set up in a LAMP con­fig­u­ra­tion. php­MyAd­min is Web-based tool for man­ag­ing, build­ing, import­ing, export­ing and explor­ing MySQL databases.
• PHPEx­cel
  PHPEx­cel is a set of use­ful PHP classes for work­ing with Microsoft Excel files. PHPEx­cel allows you to read Excel files and write to them. This is use­ful for dynam­i­cally gen­er­at­ing Excel spread­sheets for downloading.
• Phormer
  Phormer is a PHP-based photo gallery man­age­ment appli­ca­tion that helps you to store, cat­e­go­rize and trim your pho­tos online.
• xajax PHP Class Library
  xajax is a PHP class for eas­ily work­ing with PHP AJAX appli­ca­tions. It gives you an easy-to-use API for quickly man­ag­ing AJAX-related tasks. Check out the xajax Mul­ti­plier demo and the Graf­fiti Wall demo to see the xajax PHP class in action.
• PHP User Class
  PHP User Class is an excel­lent script that helps you cre­ate a sys­tem for user authen­ti­ca­tion (i.e. reg­is­tra­tion, log in, account pro­file, etc.). It’s a use­ful util­ity to have around if you require user reg­is­tra­tion for your Web applications.
• PHP-GTK
  PHP-GTK is a PHP exten­sion for the GTK+ toolkit (a robust toolkit for devel­op­ing GUIs). It is a suite of use­ful OOP func­tions and classes to help you rapidly build cross-platform, client-side GUI’s for your application.

PHP Online Tools and Resources

• Minify!
  Minify is a PHP 5 app that can com­bine mul­ti­ple CSS or JavaScript files, com­press their con­tent (i.e. remove unnec­es­sary white space and com­ments) and serve the results with HTTP encod­ing (via Gzip/deflate) and head­ers that allow opti­mal client-side caching. This will help you fol­low sev­eral of Yahoo!’s Rules for High Per­for­mance Web­sites.
• HTTP_StaticMerger: Auto­matic “merg­ing” of CSS and JavaScript files
  This library auto­mat­i­cally merges sets of sta­tic files (CSS or JavaScript) and speeds up page load­ing (by low­er­ing the num­ber of HTTP queries). It is rec­om­mended to use this together with caching reverse-proxy to min­i­mize the response time.
• PHP Object Gen­er­a­tor
  PHP Object Gen­er­a­tor is an open-source Web-based tool that helps you quickly con­struct PHP objects and lever­age object-oriented pro­gram­ming (OOP) prin­ci­ples in your code.
• gotAPI/PHP
  gotAPI is a use­ful online tool for quickly look­ing up PHP func­tions and classes. Also check out the Quick PHP look-up wid­get exam­ple in case you’d like to include this awe­some look-up fea­ture on your website.
• koders
  koders is a search engine for open-source and down­load­able code. It cur­rently has over a bil­lion lines of code indexed and isn’t lim­ited to just PHP.
• PECL
  PECL is a direc­tory of all known PHP exten­sions and a host­ing facil­ity for down­load­ing and devel­op­ing PHP extensions.

In-Browser Tools (Fire­fox Add-Ons)

• FirePHP
  FirePHP is a Fire­fox exten­sion that allows you to log data in Fire­bug. It has a vari­ety of use­ful log­ging fea­tures, such as the abil­ity to change your error and excep­tion han­dling on the fly and to log errors directly to the Fire­bug con­sole. To learn more about what FirePHP can do, check out the FirePHP guide on how to use FirePHP. For devel­op­ers using the Zend PHP frame­work, you might find this guide on using FirePHP with Zend useful.
• phpLangEd­i­tor
  phpLangEd­i­tor is a very handy Fire­fox add-on for trans­lat­ing lan­guage files and vari­ables in your script.
• PHP Lookup
  PHP Lookup is a built-in search bar to help you quickly look up ref­er­ences to PHP syntax.
• PHP Man­ual Search
  PHP Man­ual Search is a handy search bar that searches offi­cial PHP doc­u­men­ta­tion from within your Web browser.

Frame­works for PHP

• Dwoo
  Dwoo is a PHP 5 tem­plate engine posi­tioned as an alter­na­tive to Smarty. It is (nearly) fully com­pat­i­ble with its tem­plates and plug-ins, but it is being writ­ten from scratch and is aimed to go one step fur­ther with a cleaner code base.
• CodeIgniter
  CodeIgniter is a pow­er­ful, high-performance, open-source PHP frame­work that helps you author PHP appli­ca­tions rapidly. CodeIgniter is known for hav­ing a light foot­print, thereby reduc­ing your server’s work. You can get up and run­ning with CodeIgniter in a jiffy: it has an awe­some online man­ual, a cou­ple of help­ful video tuto­ri­als and an active user forum.
• YII Frame­work
  Here is a high-performance component-based PHP frame­work that is sup­posed to be more effi­cient than CodeIgniter, CakePHP, ZF and Sym­fony. An opti­mal solu­tion for devel­op­ing large-scale Web appli­ca­tions. Yii sup­ports MVC, DAO/ActiveRecord, I18N/L10N, caching, jQuery-based AJAX sup­port, authen­ti­ca­tion and role-based access con­trol, scaf­fold­ing, input val­i­da­tion, wid­gets, events, them­ing and Web services.
• Net­Beans
  A ded­i­cated PHP cod­ing envi­ron­ment and com­plete inte­gra­tion with web stan­dards. The Net­Beans PHP edi­tor is dynam­i­cally inte­grated with Net­Beans HTML, JavaScript and CSS edit­ing fea­tures such as syn­tax high­light­ing and the JavaScript debug­ger. Net­Beans IDE 6.5 fully sup­ports iter­a­tive devel­op­ment, so test­ing PHP projects fol­lows the clas­sic pat­terns famil­iar to web developers.
• Solar
  Solar is a PHP 5 devel­op­ment frame­work for Web appli­ca­tions derived from the Savant tem­plat­ing engine. Solar uses the MVC archi­tec­tural pat­tern and has a host of classes and func­tions for secur­ing your Web app against SQL injec­tion, cross-website script­ing (XSS) and other com­mon exploits.
• sym­fony
  sym­fony is an open-source PHP 5 Web appli­ca­tion frame­work that is well known for its mod­u­lar­ity and use­ful library of classes. To get up and run­ning as fast as pos­si­ble, you should check out the prag­matic sym­fony online tuto­r­ial called “The sym­fony 1.2 advent cal­en­dar tuto­r­ial,” which takes you through a step-by-step exam­ple of build­ing your own symfony-based Web application.
• PEAR – PHP Exten­sion and Appli­ca­tion Repos­i­tory
  PEAR is a pop­u­lar frame­work and dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem for reusable PHP com­po­nents. The pur­pose of the frame­work is to pro­vide a struc­tured library of open-source code for PHP users, a sys­tem for code dis­tri­b­u­tion and pack­age main­te­nance and a stan­dard style for PHP code.
• Pro­pel
  Pro­pel is an Object-Relational Map­ping (ORM) frame­work for PHP 5. It allows you to access your data­base using a set of objects, pro­vid­ing a sim­ple API for stor­ing and retriev­ing data.
• {{macro}} tem­plate engine
  {{macro}} com­piles ini­tial tem­plates into exe­cutable PHP scripts with very clean syn­tax (much cleaner than WACT and Smarty) and exe­cutes them very fast. The engine doesn’t use an XML-like syn­tax; there are only two data scopes, global and local, and no more data sources (all data is dis­played with reg­u­lar PHP vari­ables); and the sys­tem sup­ports all WACT fea­tures such as tem­plates wrap­ping and including.
• Zend Frame­work
  The Zend Frame­work by Zend Tech­nolo­gies (the cre­ators of PHP’s script­ing engine) is a pop­u­lar PHP Web appli­ca­tion frame­work that embraces the prin­ci­ples of PHP OOP; it’s very exten­si­ble and has built-in util­i­ties for work­ing with free Web ser­vice APIs, such as those of Google, Flickr and Ama­zon.
• Qcodo
  Qcodo is an excel­lent open-source PHP Web appli­ca­tion frame­work. It’s sub­di­vided into two parts: (1) Code Gen­er­a­tor, and (2) Qforms. Code Gen­er­a­tor han­dles the cre­ation of object code and PHP and HTML front-end code from your data model. Qforms is an intu­itive sys­tem for han­dling and cre­at­ing com­plex PHP-driven HTML Web forms. Check out demos of appli­ca­tions that use Qcodo and pre­sen­ta­tional mate­r­ial that cov­ers Qcodo.
• SAJAX
  SAJAX is a JavaScript and AJAX appli­ca­tion frame­work that works well with PHP (as well as sev­eral other server-side script­ing lan­guages). See SAJAX at work by going to Wall live demon­stra­tion.
• Smarty
  Smarty is a pop­u­lar PHP tem­plat­ing sys­tem to help you sep­a­rate PHP logic and front-end code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). It will keep your projects mod­u­lar and eas­ier to maintain.
• CakePHP
  CakePHP is one of the lead­ing PHP frame­works for cre­at­ing robust, fully-featured Web appli­ca­tions. CakePHP has an exten­sive and well-organized online man­ual. If you want to learn via video tuto­ri­als, check out the CakePHP screen­casts.
• Savant2
  Savant2 is another pop­u­lar object-oriented PHP tem­plat­ing sys­tem. Instead of a spe­cial syn­tax unique to Savant2, you use PHP syn­tax to develop your project’s template.
• PHP­Spec
  PHP­Spec is a sim­ple and intu­itive PHP frame­work. It fol­lows the Behavior-Driven Devel­op­ment prin­ci­ple and there­fore allows you to write behavior-oriented code, often­times in plain English.

PHP IDEs and Editors

• PHPEclipse
  PHPEclipse is a pop­u­lar PHP source-code edi­tor that is open source and runs on all the major oper­at­ing sys­tems, such as Win­dows, Linux and Mac OS. It has all the fea­tures you’d expect from a PHP source-code edi­tor, such as code-folding, syn­tax high­light­ing, hover-over tool tips and sup­port for XDe­bug and DBG.
• PhpED
  PhpED is an excel­lent IDE for Win­dows users. It is one of the most robust and feature-packed IDEs cur­rently out on the mar­ket and has use­ful fea­tures such as a built-in source-code pro­filer to find bot­tle­necks in your PHP source code and excel­lent inte­gra­tion with third-party apps and ser­vices just as front-end code validation.
• phpDe­signer
  phpDe­signer is a light­weight PHP editor/IDE that also han­dles front-end code and markup remark­ably well. Check out the phpDe­signer online tuto­ri­als, as well as screen­casts on phpDe­signer to help you learn more about the IDE.
• Zend Stu­dio
  Zend Stu­dio is an excel­lent PHP IDE for Eclipse. It’ll help you develop, deploy and man­age Rich Inter­net Appli­ca­tions (RIAs) in an intu­itive interface.
• Aptana PHP
  Aptana PHP is an open-source IDE extension/plug-in to be used in con­junc­tion with Aptana Stu­dio. To learn more, be sure to check out the online doc­u­men­ta­tion about Aptana PHP.
• PDT
  PDT is a PHP Devel­op­ment Tools frame­work that’s part of the Eclipse project. PDT includes all the nec­es­sary tools for you to cre­ate PHP-based Web applications.
• VS.Php
  VS.Php is a PHP IDE for MS Visual Stu­dio, mak­ing it a great IDE for recently con­verted ASP devel­op­ers who have used MS VS to develop Web appli­ca­tions. To get you up and run­ning ASAP with VS.Php, check out Jcx.Software’s online tuto­ri­als as well as its online doc­u­men­ta­tion.
• PHPEdit
  PHPEdit is an excel­lent PHP editor/IDE with a ton of use­ful fea­tures and a very intu­itive user inter­face. To learn more about why PHPEdit is a good IDE, read the 10 rea­sons to use PHPEdit and view the intro­duc­tory screen­cast about PHPEdit.

Sources and Resources

• PHP Func­tion Ref­er­ence
  PHP Func­tion Ref­er­ence (PHPfr) is a Mac OS X dash­board wid­get that pro­vides a fast look-up of infor­ma­tion about the PHP Web pro­gram­ming language.
• 30 Use­ful PHP Classes and Com­po­nents
  30 use­ful PHP classes and com­po­nents that you can use to test, develop, debug and deploy your PHP applications.
• PHP advent 2008
  In Decem­ber, phpadvent.org col­lected the wis­dom of peo­ple in the PHP com­mu­nity who kindly donated their ideas and tips to see us through the new year.
• Use­ful in-browser devel­op­ment tools for PHP
• PHPClasses.org
  A huge repos­i­tory of var­i­ous PHP classes.
• PHP Developer’s Tool­box
  Var­i­ous PHP-related resources in a brief overview.

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