I started using NetBeans recently with PHP and have been very happy with it. It was a heck of a lot easier to setup than Eclipse and generally stays out of the way. It has a very easy to use interface for working with Git and uploading to servers. I've rearranged my workflow so that I work locally with Git, and upload tests to a development server, then commit the changes and pull them down on the production servers. It's actually not much different except I'm using some of the tools more and having NetBeans upload for me. I'm still missing a few autocomplete/lookup things in CakePHP in NetBeans, but most of it is there when I include the lib dir of cake. The big problem lately that I finally found a solution for has been preventing the autoredirect in CakePHP's Auth component. You can use your user login function, but the component always redirects to it's default. There is an option the docs don't directly mention called "autoRedirect". I found it while looking for something else, but that's the option you want if you want to add admin routing in and control the redirect.