I work on PC and Linux environments so my recommendations will be for these platforms. Given that my favourite IDEs and editors are all open-source projects, you won’t be shelling out any money, we’re already off to a good start 😉 Will we only be editing code occasionally, maybe to make small changes to a theme? Or will we be spending most of our time building WordPress themes or plugins? What Operating System are we using? Are we willing to spend money on an IDE?

We also need to think about our planned usage of the IDE or file editor. First of all we need an IDE that is compatible with PHP, which is the programming language WordPress is written in. Update July 2012: If you are looking for an IDE within the WordPress dashboard, check out our post on best code editors within WordPress.Ī good IDE can help you program faster and better, so lets take a look at some of the most popular IDE options for WordPress development.

Update April 2012: I now recommend Sublime Text for all platforms, closely followed by Komodo IDE, which has the extra feature of debugging which Sublime Text does not yet have.

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