In this article I'll give a few examples of powerful ways to program PHP that aren't obvious to many. The tricks I mention here are in themselves nothing new and experienced programmers probably know about them all but budding and intermediate PHP programmers can probably pick up a thing or two.

Eclipse has been my primary web development environment for over a year now. With plugins for version control, JavaScript/AJAX and PHP development, it's a perfect integrated environment for building Drupal websites and writing modules and themes. Eclipse has worked mostly fine apart from recently when I've been having some problems with system crashes (virtually unheard of on a Mac) seeming related to Eclipse or Apache. In an attempt to fix that problem I reinstalled Apache, MySQL and PHP as well as Eclipse and also took the opportunity to try the PHP Development Tools from Zend.