A good workflow and application to develop themes (emb. font tip also)

[Electabuzz]

Hello there .

I'm looking for a good tool to develop themes, something that allows me to edit PHP, HTML and CSS comfortably and that provides fancy helpers also .

I'm used to Linux systems but I have a Windows 7 license (from last xmas) so i really don't care too much for which platform it is. At the moment i'm using NetBeans and it's okay, but i don't mind to spend some gold pieces in a new software if it's worth the investment.

Also, is there something like an firefox extension that monitor the file changes and refresh the page, to test the changes on-tha-fly? I'm also using firebug to assist me, is it recommended? I dunno if there's a better way to do that. And i don't understand why the browsers takes some times (1sec?) to load a page that's on my PC.

Another thing that really annoys me is the fact that fonts embedded from googleapis takes some unacceptable time to load due to high latency from my country to google servers. Do you know if there's a way to use alternative servers or something? because the google search page has local servers. I don't want to host them in my own server because i fear people will load my fonts to their websites and i'm note good configuring apache to prevent that kind of robbery .

Thank you very much.

[Connie]

Hi!

I try to find some answers beside that your questions seem to be a strange mixture of beginner's and experts'-questions ;=)

the best workflow at all would be a local server like WAMP or LAMP on your computer, where you install and test

1) if you read the WIKI here about themes you will understand that you will not need any special tool for developing themes, a plain UTF-8-featured TextEditor is your tool of choice, in windows you could notepad++ for example

2)
why should we unrecommend good tools like firebug?
a good tool for webdevelopers is Chris Pedericks Webdeveloper Extension for FIrefox,
an example: you can edit CSS on the fly and test and when it is ok, you can save it

3)
if you feel that Google APIs take too long, just don't use them
and if you use fonts, which are not common, people will have to load these fonts to their computers (the browsers do that)
so avoid these fonts and use regular fonts and no problem at all

Please notice, that all these questions do not really refer to GetSimple, these questions are common, not GS-specific
there are lots of tutorials in the web, for example font-comparisons etc.

[polyfragmented]

I'm looking for a good tool to develop themes, something that allows me to edit PHP, HTML and CSS comfortably and that provides fancy helpers also . (...) At the moment i'm using NetBeans and it's okay.

An alternative to Netbeans is Aptana Studio. Komodo (Edit or IDE) might be worth a look as well.

I'm also using firebug to assist me, is it recommended? I dunno if there's a better way to do that. And i don't understand why the browsers takes some times (1sec?) to load a page that's on my PC.

Firebug is very recommended, it's a powerful, extensible and versatile webdev tool. The developer tools in Opera and Webkit (Chrome, Safari) are said to be quite powerful too.

Your second question is hard to answer. Does the latency occur with Firebug disabled as well?

Another thing that really annoys me is the fact that fonts embedded from googleapis takes some unacceptable time to load due to high latency from my country to google servers. Do you know if there's a way to use alternative servers or something?

Maybe the Typekit service is for you.

[Electabuzz]

Nice answers. Thanks.

Connie: Well, i'm using a LAP in fact because i don't need MySQL at the moment . That extension is very good. And about the fonts, nowadays, imho a requirement for a good looking website is a non-standard font.

polyfragmented: Thank you for the recommendations i'm gonna check them immediately. The latency problem is due the distance from the server. Other fonts providers has lower latency though, so i'll compare them and choose the best one. That one you recommended has a substantially lower latency for example. And it seems as good as googleapis.

Thank you very much guys!

[n00dles101]

On the fonts side of things , why don't you use @font-face and host them locally on your sites server.

I use www.fontsquirrel.com for my fonts and has hundreds of @font-face kits already prepackaged and ready to go for your sites.....

[Electabuzz]

Thank you very much n00dles101!

[flamenco]

On the fonts side of things , why don't you use @font-face and host them locally on your sites server.

I use www.fontsquirrel.com for my fonts and has hundreds of @font-face kits already prepackaged and ready to go for your sites.....

I also use font-face all the time now. Font squirrel is extremely helpful. The designers I work with love having fonts available. You can generate web-friendly fonts from any decent font file there.

I've found that when generating these there, using "optimal" gives you nicer results than "basic". Of course, having a decent quality font file matters. There are loads of good free fonts, and paid ones aren't necessarily too expensive.

Cheers, Dave

[datiswous]

Didn't test them all:

PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, HTML, CSS and JavaScript :
http://shiftedit.net/

Only html and css:
http://rendera.heroku.com/

purely for css:
Free: http://www.cqstyle.com/
Free Chrome plugin: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detai...paofnmnkn#
Not-free: http://www.skybound.ca/