Hello, PHP-ninja Jeremy here again! A few weeks ago, I posted a blog about my 13 Favorite WordPress Plugins and got a lot of questions about what other types of tools I use to make my job easier. So here it is, my top 10 list. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, but excellence of this caliber takes a lot of support. Enjoy!
1. Malsup Plugins
http://malsup.com/jquery/
These are some of my favorite and most-used jQuery plugins. Mike has done an amazing job at building solid and well-documented plugins. I especially love the Form plugin!
2. Preloaders
http://www.preloaders.net
I’ve never met a designer who wanted to custom design a loading indicator, much less animate it. So it’s usually up to me, a colorblind and socially-awkward developer who stopped drawing in middle school, to figure out what will look good. Preloaders to the rescue!
Honorable mention: ajaxload.info
3. FamFamFam Icons
http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/
A gorgeous and very useful collection of icons, you can drop these into just about any project and they’ll look great. Works wonders for custom post type icons, too. (You’re not leaving those set to the default “pin” icon, are you!?)
4. Mozilla Developer’s Network
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
My go-to resource for news and updates on most web development technologies I use. Way easier to understand than the official HTML5 specification.
5. Initializr
http://www.initializr.com/
Need to start a project fast? Generate a boilerplate with Initializr and you can take the rest of the day off! Fill it with Lorem Ipsum and take two days off.
6. PHP Manual
http://php.net/manual/en/
The best documentation available for PHP. This thing is chock full of examples and comments from other developers. If you need to learn about a function or language construct of PHP, there’s no other website you should go to first.
7. Pastie.org
http://pastie.org
I use this for sharing code/snippets with people quickly, so they can review it or help figure out where an issue lies. I love the color coding options and the ability to set it to private, so that only people with the link can see the post. I also like looking through the public posts to see all the awful stuff people are putting up there.
8. JSFiddle
http://jsfiddle.net
Sort of like Pastie on steroids, JSFiddle is almost a complete IDE in the web browser. You can share your functioning HTML/CSS/JS with other people, who can then edit it as well as create new branches so your original code doesn’t get destroyed.
Honorable mention: http://codepen.io (just as good, if not better than JSFiddle. I definitely like the design more.)
9. Google Developers
https://developers.google.com/
Like most things Google does, their developer resource library is well-made and extensive. If you’re working on a project that uses any of Google’s APIs, those fine folks have made plenty of examples for you to dissect and learn from – and of course the full blown API documentation as well.
10. Google Web Fonts
http://www.google.com/fonts/
I’ve almost forgotten about the days when websites were limited to the 12 or so system fonts that most OSes used. Google, among others, has made the embedding and use of custom fonts so easy and ubiquitous that even management knows about it!
Honorable mention: http://fontsquirrel.com
I know what some of you are thinking, “It’s more fun and rewarding to figure things out on my own.” And I agree, in most cases – but sometimes you ain’t got time/resources to do so and that’s the beauty of living in an open source world. What tools do you love? Want to add one or 10 to this list? Leave us a comment.
