I was wondering what kind of tools you guys use to manage/create your projects. I'm not talking only about an editor and an ftp program, but more about the longterm advantages of tools.

I don't want to spend money (yet) on tools and/or software to help me with this, so i'm looking for freeware software.
For editing i use Notepad++, just so you know.

But what about version control? I'd like to keep track of changing of files, and be able to go back a version, or at least find out the differences. Which brings me to some kind of diff/patch creation. Compare two files, notice the differences, and create a diff file for it. Which brings me to the next; Notepad++ has some kind of thing for this (Compare plugin), but this compares 2 files. What would be even better is to be able to compare two almost similar directories (f.e. version 1 and version 2 and get total report of what's different).
Do you guys use anything like this?
It tends to get a bit annoying to keep track manually of all kinds of changes on a system you make, and want to share that with clients. It would be great if there's an easy way to "monitor" or "compare" it with a previous version, so updates on other systems are made easy (or at least easier).

And when you're ready and want to deploy something but want to keep your code safe from reselling and such, will you encrypt it? If yes, with what kind of tool? I've checked out Zend encode, but that it way out of budget. Any freeware for this?

Ofcourse editors with plugins for this are not out of the question. I like Notepad++ but i'm willing to experiment.

Looking forward to reading about how you guys handle this.

I don't use any version control for my personal projects but for professional builds I use Subversion (SVN). It's a very well supported Open Source Version Control System. As far as I know, you can only run it on Linux. It is a very useful program and stores all previous versions of code making you go through a checkout/checkin process for any changes you make to the project repository.

As for encoding my code? Absolutely no reason to encode PHP for reasons of keeping code safe as it is all parsed on the server prior to getting to the client (javascript is a little different but nothing can really stop someone selling that on)...

What is useful for PHP though is pre-compiling the code to binary form and caching it allowing it to run much faster next execution. There are a few of these code cachers out there but the Zend one is a respected one.

nope! check out http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

I've also only ever used SVN, at school, privately, and at work.... has a slightly steep learning curve if you're planning to use all the features but it's very powerful!

There are several good quick guides for SVN and Tortoise at lifehacker, to get you started:

http://lifehacker.com/software/top/hack-at...rver-188582.php
http://lifehacker.com/software/subversion/...esvn-192367.php

Thanks for the tips. I've been reading on SVN on wiki, but thought it was for linux only as well. I'll check out the links you gave.



Yeah ofcourse, i know.
But it won't be the case that all my applications will run on my own server. Which means it'll have to be installed on someone else's server, which in turn means they can re-use/copy/sell the code.

For version control there are 3 I use:

Visual SourceSafe (VSS)
Subversion (SVN)
Git

VSS I use at work because that's the chosen platform (although I occasionally use it for my personal .Net projects, only because of its integration with Visual Studio).

SVN I use for most other things, personal projects, my resume. I've even got my wife using it for files that she wants access to on both our home PC and the laptop. Helps keep things in sync since we push/pull updates from the repository which is on one of my servers down south. We use TortoiseSVN for this. As c010depunkk mentioned, there's a learning curve for the advanced features but basic update/commit is relatively straight forward.

I've just started using Git recently on my Linux servers for things like configuration files. Branching is freaking sweet with Git. Windows support sucks, but like I said I only use it on Linux boxes.

For diffs, check out WinMerge.

Thanks. I think i'll give Subversion with TortoiseSVN a go. As far as i can see in that tutorial it has WinMerge integrated in it, so i'll guess i'll be using that as well. I'll give the install a go when i have the time. Maybe tomorrow night.

I'll keep you informed on my experience with it. Or i'll read other/addiotional tips here in the meantime.

I know I like to keep this structured and organized, but somehow after some time, things seem to get messy anyway, mostly because of the lack of using decent software to help me with it. Maybe this'll improve it. So thanks again so far.