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As mentioned in my last article How to Maintain Your WordPress Plugin from a Windows Workstation using Subversion I use Windows my machines. But as well I use Linux. At home, I have got a weak, old Acer Travelmate with a Pention III Processor and Win2k. It is meant to be used for checking mail and web-browsing. At the office I use another Windows Machine, a brand new Dell Dimension dualcore running WinXP and Open Suse 10.2. My third machine is an Asus laptop that has a centrino dual core processor is set up with Open Suse 10.2, too.

So how can I achieve a cross platform working environment to streamline my WordPress plugin development workflow on Linux and on Windows?

When I start working on a new WordPress plugin, I usually follow these steps:

1. editing the code (Jedit)
2. debugging the plugin’s functionality within a testing environment (WAMP5 or XAMPP, PHP error_reporting)
3. debugging the plugin’s markup (Firefox, Firebug)
4. translating (poedit)
5. publishing (Tortoise SVN, kdesvn)

The code editor:

I use is jedit, a java text editor that offers me all the features I really need:

• syntax highlighting forPHP, Javascript, CSS
• remote editing via FTP
• PHP Parser (Debugger)

There are loads of plugins that can be installed to extend the functionality of jedit, I’ll do a seperate post on how I set it up for WordPress plugin development.

The testing environment:

To run an offline copy of my blog for testing purposes I use WAMP5 or XAMPP (on Windows). It is really easy to install and to set up. I use it in “Off line Mode” and turn on PHP error_reporting, but when I want some friends to get a glimpse on my newest top secret features, I switch to “Online” and have a dynamic dns set up to allow them access to the testing environment. On linux machines, you can use XAMPP for linux, if you perfer a similar tool.

The browser & extensions:

Very essential to me is Firefox & Firebug. Without these two I would be lost. When the PHP code is debugged and it comes to CSS and Javascript debugging, Firebug rules. There are a few other extensions like IETab and Yslow that I use as well, but setting up Firefox for web development would fill some other posts and has been covered enough I think.

The translation tool:

Poedit is a gettext editor. It is available for all OSs. See this tutorial for a setup.

Publishing:

I’ve covered an introduction on releasing and maintaining WordPress plugins via SVN from a Windows machine here. The process on other operating systems is similar. On Linux I use Kdesvn, a tool that is similar to Tortaois SVN.

These tools run on all my computers, from the weak pentium III laptop to the dualcore multimedia workstation.