I’m currently working on a little side project that involves doing lots of customisations to WordPress. (What exactly I’m up too will have to remain a secret for the moment, sorry customers orders.) I’ve been working today on writing a new plugin for WordPress that will turn it into what I need for my client, once the plugin has reached a use-able state I’ll start with the theme.

My development environment currently consists of WordPress 2.7 running on XAMPP for Windows (MySQL + Apache + PHP) with NetBeans 6.5 with PHP support. Netbeans works great as a PHP editor and its also a good Java IDE (although I’m not using it as that at the moment for this project.).

My biggest problem has been dusting off my PHP knowledge and trying to puzzle out the WordPress plugin API. There is alot of info on writing WordPress plugins on the WordPress Codex another useful link is this one on how to configure Netbeans for wordpress plugin development, I suggest you check out on the same page the info about creating a wordpress project and importing the source so you can have all the auto-completion goodness. The only thing I haven’t gotten working yet is XDebug so I can’t debug the PHP code or step through it in Netbeans, not sure why its not working but touch wood I haven’t needed it yet.