Here are a list of the tools that we use to develop websites.

We develop all websites off line, and once we are happy with a version of a site, we will synchronise it to the production server.

We run apache locally, and have setup our windows hosts file so that we can enter a 'test' domain name that represents a website. For example, our test platform for http://GravitySpike.com.au is accessed locally as http://gravityspike/

This is important because if we are referencing files using local paths, it will be obvious when we are testing our local website. Some sort of web server is also necessary for testing PHP files locally.

We also make use of a few .htaccess commands, particularly mod_rewrite for making websites more Search Engine Friendly

We use SVN which is a source code revision control program. It allows us to save our work, make changes, and then roll back to older versions of our code if we make a mistake, or completely delete files accidentally.

FTPing your entire website everytime you publish your latest changes is time consuming and a waste of bandwidth. We use synchronising software called WebSynchronizer that just uploads the changed files. We use a filter to ensure that unneccessary files are not uploaded.

We also use FTP Surfer when we want to connect directly to an ftp server to upload/download.

The scripting language we use is PHP 5. We try and keep up to date with the latest version. To make it easier to work with PHP 5 we use PhpED, which is one of the few pieces of software we have purchased. PhpED is much better than Zend Studio, primarily because it is quick to load. Zend is slow, and I found we fell back to using an editor rather than wait for Zend to load. We did use EditPlus2, but that has become unstable, I'm not sure why, so switched over to PS Pad Editor, which is great.

I use the Smarty Template System which is a PHP class to separate my programming logic from my presentation logic. More recently, since I've started working with Drupal, the template system is actually PHPTemplate, but I do have the choice to use Smarty.

While I should, I rarely do much actual web page work inside Dreamweaver. I grew up hand coding pages in HTML, and I can't shake the habit. I find hand coding gives cleaner HTML code, and I understand exactly what is happening. Most the web gui wysiwyg interfaces add dodgy code in my opinion.

The database that we use is MySQL.. Again, I try and use the latest version available.

To manage my database I use a tool called SQLYog, which features a handy tunnel program for connecting remotely to your databases. Forget mucking around with PhpDbAdmin, SQLYog is way more convenient.

My current choice of browser is Firefox, primarily for it's add-ons that are very useful for debugging. My favourite debugging tool is firebug, but I also like liveHTTP headers. Advice - run Firefox with as few add-ons as you can. It can be memory hungry, and I find that many tabs with websites that contain flash can be troublesome.

IF I ever have to do some sort of Flash presentation (which I avoid, primarily for SEO reasons) I use SwishMax. It is affordably priced, and much easier to use than Flash, although you won't have quite the same flexibility as Flash.

My CMS of choice is DRUPAL. Why reinvent the wheel when I can use a free CMS that powers some of the largest sites on the web today, including Warner Bros Music, Yahoo, Forbes, the Discovery Channel and even the United Nations (just to name a few!). Drupal offers a very solid platform, that is reasonably search engine friendly, with a very easy module system for extending it's functionality.