Charles Reace
PHP Musings

I recently downloaded and installed the Community Edition (i.e.: free) of the Aptana Studio IDE, which includes a PHP plug-in. My initial impression is a good one, and at some point I'll probably write a review here; but for now I just wanted to report on a problem I encountered and the very simple fix that resolved it.

The issue was that when I clicked on the File -> New... menu selection, it listed options for several types of files to create (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc.), but there was no option for a new PHP file. This causes two problems: you cannot then have it start with your desired template PHP text, plus the editor does not start in what I'll call a "PHP mode" where features like syntax highlighting and parse error checking work.

After trying a couple searches of the Aptana forums, I found a simple fix in this thread. All I needed to do was select the Window -> Reset Perspective option, okay the confirmation pop-up, and I was good to go. At this point I have no idea why that was needed, or for that matter what it even does; but at least it was simple, and hopefully this might help someone else searching the web for a solution to this little annoyance.

Aptana screen shot