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Favorite Tools Of The Trade


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I think it might be a good idea for PrestaShop users to share their knowledge, experiences and perspectives on related tools of the trade. With that in mind, I'll set the ball rolling:

  • General editor: Komodo Edit - It's free, open source, efficient, and fairly intuitive
  • Diff tools: DiffMerge is a good, free, cross-platform diff tool.
  • Text search: grepWin is a cool, free searc/replace tool..adds context menu in Windows...very handy.
  • FTP: Filezilla is free, open source, well-maintained and supported.
  • Graphics editing: Corel PaintShop Pro does more or less everything that Adobe Photoshop does, at a fraction of the price. Priced even better, at free is Gimp, which is a pretty decent option.
  • Graphics optimization: Yahoo!'s free web-based SmushIt service is pretty good - lossless compression, about 20% filesize savings, and you don't have to do anything manually (except upload the pictures to the website which will create the optimized images for you).
  • Testing & debugging: Firebug (free Firefox add-on) is a perpetual favorite. There's nothing like it, really.
  • CSS tool: Dabblet is a phenomenal CSS playground. Especially useful if you are starting off with CSS, but great even if you are an advanced user. Play! (of course, Firebug is very useful here as well)
  • Screenshots: I use the Windows 7 built-in Snipping Tool.
  • Multibrowser testing: Free, web-based service Browsershots is very decent.
  • Website speed test: Yahoo's Yslow and Google's Pagespeed are both excellent and free.
  • Video editing: There are several options. You could use Windows 7's built in Windows Live Movie Maker which is very simple to use. If you are looking for advanced functionality, Sony Vegas Pro is brilliant but expensive.
  • CMS: PrestaShop provides the capability to build a few additional content pages. If that's enough for you, great! If not, you may want to try a full-fledged program. I like the free and open source Wordpress because of its simplicity and the large number of addons available. Joomla and Drupal are quite popular among techies but have steep learning curves and complex interfaces.
  • Bulletin board: Free and open source option phpBB is the most popular, and perhaps most powerful, one out there. But in some areas they are still behind the curve. If you use Wordpress as your CMS, a good option could be the simple, light, bbpress (also free and open source) from Wordpress' developers.
  • CRM: This is simple - very powerful, free, open source vTiger. They also offer a hosted version for a price.
  • Newsletter: MailChimp is beautiful, elegant, hosted web-based service with a freemium model. Up to 2000 subscribers, you can use the service for free. If you have the technical and design chops to dare, try the free, open source phplist for size.
  • Survey: There are plenty of web-based tools like Survey Monkey and Zoomerang out there with freemium models - for free you get unlimited surveys, limited number of questions, limited respondents etc. To get more functionality, you have to pay. There is not that much to differentiate among these in terms of quality

So that's me. What about you?

 

Please endeavor to tell us

  • the tools that you use, and the tools that you will definitely not use
  • the pros and cons of these in brief, as you see fit
  • whether these are free and/or OpenSource

Also, please feel free to comment, always in a polite and constructive manner, on other people's choices and reasons.

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Great idea OC2PS! Here are a couple of my go-to tools that you didn't already mention:

 

Text Editor: Notepad++ is great for searching and comparing different files, especially if you install some of their extensions

 

Development Environment: Eclipse is a lifesaver when it comes to searching specific strings, especially across multiple different versions of PrestaShop

 

Screenshots: I use Jing, which does both screenshots and screencasts, and even can upload them to their site for easy linking

 

Video Editor: It doesn't get any better and simpler than iMovie, if you ask me

 

Graphics Editor: I personally can't stand GIMP, PhotoShop continues to be my go-to.

 

What else do you guys use?

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I use Mac.

Just discovered Text Wrangler, much better than Text Edit in a Mac. It is free.

FTP: I don´t use other that Cyberduck. I don´t know if it is the best or the worst: is the only one I use. Its free.

Screen shots in a Mac?: command+shift+4

Photoshop

 

Maybe Windows, Mac and Linux users have different preferences

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