What program do you use to edit php remotely and then upload to your server? [closed]

Question

So I am just starting out developing PHP web applications and have finished setting up my server with the following:

• Ubuntu Server
• Apache2
• PHP
• MySQL
• VSFTPD
• and all the other goodies...

Currently when I edit files, I have two methods to update/upload them to the server. I can use vi on the server to make small changes or I can use NetBeans 6.5 RC2 and then use VSFTPD to upload them to my home directory and 'mv' the file to the proper location (/var/www).

My questions: What method should I use to edit PHP and upload them to the server? Is NetBeans ideal? Does vi really have as few features as I've found (basic text editor commands with no PHP IDE functions). What am I missing? From the amount of material I've discovered just as I've begun to write a PHP application, I know there must be a better solution but haven't found one yet.

(Note: I have meddled around in setting chroot_local_user=NO but realized that if I upload something that ends up breaking my site I have no backup copy.)

Answer 1

I don't like very much the idea about making changes directly on the server, I can recommend you another approach: Use a version control system, there you check in all the changes that you do to your code, then you can easily checkout or export all the modifications when you deploy, and in that way you'll have the complete history about all the changes that have been done on each file, you can have full control of your code...

I use Subversion, and it is very easy to deploy your versioned source code to the production server...