Smarty syntax highlighting in Zend Studio 9

Alastair Grant | Sunday 5 February 2012

Zend Studio, whilst not especially great compared to things like Visual Studio, is arguably the de-facto IDE for PHP development.

One of the major lacking components is support for Smarty. No, not small coloured sweets, but one of the most popular template engines for PHP. This means when you try and write Smarty directives into files in Zend it goes crazy with validation.

Luckily where the expensive Zend fail, open source provides with the free SmartyPDT project. This is a plugin for Eclipse (that's the free IDE that the expensive Zend is built on), which provides support for Smarty directives.

Installation is simple. Just download the latest version, go to the Add New Software menu item, select the Zip archive (deselect "group items by category") and click Next a lot.

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