importing PHP projects to a fresh aptana 2.0

after long usage of notepad++ and vim for all my development needs, i wanted to try out a proper opensource IDE to see whether it could really improve my efficiency in development.

as i have worked with eclipse and netbeans before in various projects i thought i will give a try on aptana studio this time. after all it was build on eclipse eco system where you can choose to install 1000s of eclipse plugins available out there.

so i downloaded a fresh copy of aptana and installed it. the installation process was really fast. and once installed when i was trying to create a default web project i realized they don't support php by default. thats a little bit weird provided that php is one of the most widely used languages on the web development. so for their aptana studio 3 i wish they will be able to support few more different types of projects by default rather than getting the user to install them manually.

installing PDT on aptana was really a joke (seriously). both PDT 1 and 2 failed miserably on aptana studio 2. well i a little bit of googling linked me to this great article where barmus explained how to install the aptana 1.5 PHP module into aptana studio 2.

[Thanks for the great article bram, it really was a life saver]

once installed it wasnt much hard to import my previous projects into aptana, all i had to do was to follow the steps mentioned below to get it up and running like a charm.
1. goto file -> import
2. choose other -> existing folder as a new project
3. once created right click on the project and click "properties"
4. on the dialog goto "project natures" and select "PHP nature" and press ok.
5. let aptana re-open the project automatically to apply the settings

and now you have your project opened in aptana as a PHP project.

I'm going to continue to play with aptana and see what it has in it for me when it comes to my lame development habbits.

feel free to let me know if there any more sweet plugins that i should look into, or if there were any other way you guys managed to get aptana to run PHP projects.