phpDesigner – If you do any kind of coding and are still plugging away in Microsoft Frontpage or Notepad, it’s time to think about getting yourself a real tool to work in. I found phpDesigner pro through one of the Joomla forums and fell in love with it immediately.

Now, I am not a coder. Ask me to write something from scratch and you can pretty much forget it unless it’s HTML (or a poem). But I am fairly skilled in the art of reverse-engineering. Meaning, I can take someone else’s code, figure out how it works, and modify it to suit my specific needs. But to do this, I need a clean work environment, an intuitive interface and a stable program.

phpDesigner gives me all that and more. With “intelligent syntax highlighting” it’s super fast to scan through the code to find the section I’m looking for and super difficult to leave a section of incomplete code in the file. It even sports a code completion option for n00bs like me! Throw in a syntax checker and the ability to remotely edit files via ftp and you have everything you could ask for in an editor.

The folks at MPSoftware even have a completely free personal edition available for download as long as you’re only using it to tinker on your own sites and not for commercial purposes.

SmartFTP – Pretty much everyone needs a good FTP program. SmartFTP has been my favorite for years. The interface is extremely easy to use and it offers multiple panes to include a multiple local and remote browsers, a transfer queue and many other utilities. You can even preview files right inside the program window. I use this program at least twice a day every day I touch my computer. It’s a must-have on all my PC’s.