Recently, Anthony over at Joomla Bamboo posted about the tools that he uses for Joomla tempate design and development. He wanted to hear what a Windows user's setup would be in comparison to his Mac setup, so I thought I would step up and offer my setup. You will notice I'm a man of many tools, because I find most of the tools to be better suited for one situation or another.
Graphics Department - Adobe Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator
I mainly use Photoshop or Fireworks for my designs, depending on my mood. I have one of the suites, because I also use Flash and InDesign. There are some things that are easier in one or the other, and since they come together in the CS Suites from Adobe, why not utilize them both. My general rule of thumb is that Fireworks does better with vector based designs, and Photoshop does better with rasterized images. However, I also designed this website in Illustrator, because of the many vectors used, and I tend to use it when working with logos (and often with stock vectors). However, Fireworks get the bulk of the responsibility.
Adobe CS4 Web Suite - $1,699
Adobe Fireworks - $299
Adobe Photoshop - $699
Adobe Illustrator - $599
Coding Department - Adobe Dreamweaver, Notepad++, Eclipse
When I work with templates, I find myself in Dreamweaver the most. It has great support for HTML/CSS, and basic PHP (which is usually all that is needed in a Joomla template). I never use the auto-slicing tools you can setup between Fireworks and Dreamweaver, as I prefer to write my own code. Sometimes, especially language files, I use Notepad++ if I need some unique capabilities (more advanced file search/replace, file comparison, and better utf-8 support), or just want to have a second file open next to Dreamweaver. Finally, Eclipse is a powerhouse program actually designed originally for Java, but can be used with just about any language. I rarely use it with templates, but find it very useful in most other coding situations.
Adobe Dreamweaver - $399 - Best to get one of the suites
Notepad++ - Free
Eclipse - Free - Consider Eclipse for PHP
Testing Department - WAMP Server, My Host
There are two main Windows apache kits, XAMPP and WAMP. I used to use XAMPP, but found that I needed the ability to test against different versions of PHP, which WAMP allows you to install different versions of MySQL, PHP, and Apache. This means that when I'm debugging, I can try PHP4 or PHP5 by restarting my server in about 10 seconds. I have a test user account on my web host to test what things are like online verses my local server. Sometimes you miss things like bad url paths until you test it online.
FTP - FileZilla
Just as an added bonus, I use FileZilla for FTP (sometimes the Dreamweaver FTP). FileZilla has a great queue just seems to work the fastest of the clients I've tested. Sometimes I will use the Dreamweaver FTP to automatically upload as I save changes, to speed up my development when testing on a live server.
Alternatives
As you can see, I use the Adobe Creative Suite a lot in my work, but there are options out there if you are just doing this for fun or getting started. GIMP is a free image editor, and Inkscape is a great free vector editor. Notepad++ could be easily used as a Dreamweaver replacement, if you don't rely on the preview feature (I don't and don't recommend it in any program). In fact, with these alternatives you could also run most of these tools on Linux.
I'm curious what other great programs are out there for doing templates or anything Joomla for Windows. What do you use?
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