I personally have worked with Magento for the past few months and obviously, I have tested several development/deployment tools to see which one actually fits with Magento the most. Besides that, I also pay attention to the easy of use, free of charges, stability and other aspects when I test a tool/development environment. Below are the lists of top free tools that I believe they will bring you the most convenient environment to run, test and deployment Magento to your local server/web server.
Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
Netbeans IDE 6.8 (Website | Download)
I have worked with several IDEs myself such as Visual Studio, Aptana, Expression Web, Eclipse, Komodo, etc but Netbeans definitely is my favorite IDE. The reasons why I recommend Netbeans IDE to your Magento development are:
- Free. You can download Netbeans unlimited times from its official website without being charged a cent.
- Find in Projects. When you work with Magento, especially if you want to change something in your Magento theme that you just purchas online, you will find this feature extremely useful. It can help you look up something in multiple files really quickly and it also provides you the search highlighting feature.
- Subversion, CVS and Mercurial. Netbeans supports all of them. If you don’t know what they are about then subversion is a repository which allows you to keep track of changes that the other team members made on the file and show you what are the differences between two versions of the files. They are really helpful when you work in team and collaborate in a Magento theme development project.
FTP Client
FileZilla (Website | Download)
After having an IDE to look at the source code of a Magento theme, an extension or the core of Magento itself, the second tool you will need is a FTP client to upload what you have done to the real server. There are many FTP clients on the Internet right now and I have tried them all. I have tried from SmartFTP to CoreFTP and they all charge you about $30 to $40 to use them. Although they offer some useful utilities such as Copy, Cut and Paste folders as well as other features, you can still find FileZilla is a good subtitute if you want to go freeware.
I have personally used FileZilla for 3 years and I really like it. Top of the reason is it’s free. Some of you may ask why don’t I crack/enter fake serial code to those paid FTP client then my answer is No way, I don’t ever want to do that. Firstly, I don’t want violate copyright license. Secondly, FTP client holds my password and the access to my web server. And I treat my web server as a real business asset. Therefore, those cracked FTP clients are not reliable and they are not worth to trade for your real asset like that. Thirdly, FileZilla offers what I need. So, I don’t have any reasons to pay for other programs.
If you don’t like FileZilla, you’re welcome to use CoreFTP or SmartFTP. I have tried both of them, as I said above and I do prefer SmartFTP over the other one because of its look and its features.
