A Web Developer's Toolkit

For the last 10 years I've been writing web sites, and during that time I've picked up a handful of applications and libraries that I'd rather not live without. They speed up development, improve quality, and mean I have to do less work. All good things!

Applications

Some applications are essential for creating a PHP website. Some aren't essential but certainly help.

PHP5 - I think we all know what this is.
MySQL - And this.
Apache - My personal choice of web server mainly because I understand htaccess.
Subversion - Source code control.
XDebug - An awesome PHP debugger/profiler.

Libraries

Every developer has to choose between writing their own code or using a library someone else has created. While it's always tempting to retain ownership of all the code in your site it's usually better to use an open source solution. To write code to the standard some of the best libraries meet would take years. Why reinvent the wheel?

Swiftmailer - The best PHP mail sending library available bar none.
ADODB Lite - The best database abstraction layer around.
Template Lite - The best template engine.
FPDF - Awesome PDF library.
SHA256 - Hashing replacement for MD5/SHA1.
HTMLPurifier - Stop XSS attacks before they happen.
SimpleTest - Unit Testing library that'll improve your code no end.
JQuery - Javascript AJAX/effects/make stuff easier type of thing.
JPGraph - Delightful library for charts and graphs in PHP.
ExCanvas - Get <canvas> working seamlessly in IE.

Browsers

Sites need to be tested, tested, and tested some more. At the very least they need to be checked in 'the big four'.

Firefox - Best browser around.
Internet Explorer - Needed for testing because there's still people who suffer it.
Opera - Again, needed for testing.
Safari - And again.

Extensions and Plugins

My browser of choice is Firefox. There are some plugins available for it that make life so much easier for a web developer. None of them are required for writing a good site, but you'll have a more difficult time debugging things without them.

Web Developer - Absolutely critical for finding out information about the clientside things.
Firebug - Brilliant javascript console that makes AJAX so much less of a headache to debug.
YSlow - Site speed profiling plugin (needs Firebug).
NoScript - The easy way to test a site with JS and more switched off.
SearchStatus - Site search profiler, find out keyword information, page rank, Alexa rank etc.

Useful Extras

A couple of little things that don't really fit anywhere else but make sense nonetheless.

Trac - A web based project management/wiki/SVN client.
PHPMyAdmin - A web based MySQL client.

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