My curated list of commonly used (and usually free) developer tools for web development. Updated: 14 February 2024
⭐ General
- Coding Standards and Style Guides
- Coding Fonts
- Git Version Control
- Component Generators
- Image Compression
- Code Editors
- Terminals
- Visual Studio Code Extensions * WIP
- PHP General
- PHP Frameworks
- PHP Content Management Systems
- PHP Libraries
- APIs
- WordPress Plugin Development
- WordPress Tools
- Drupal Tools
Recommended coding standards for developers to follow to produce neat, consistent code
- HTML/CSS: Google's styling recommendation for HTML and CSS
- JavaScript: Google's styling recommendation of JavaScript
- PHP PSR-12: PHP coding standards for unified maintainability and readability (Extends, expands upon and replaces PSR-2)
- Python PEP 8: Python coding standards for unified maintainability and readability
There are thousands of fonts out there, I'll list a handful of my favourite ones I actively use
- VictorMono: Monospaced font with optional semi-connected cursive italics and programming symbol ligatures.
- FiraCode: Monospaced font with programming ligatures
- Nerd Fonts: Specifically the
Hackfont that comes in this set is great for terminals
Developer guides for Git and GitHub
- gitignore Templates: A collection of useful .gitignore templates
- Oh shit, git!: Git is hard: screwing up is easy, and figuring out how to fix your mistakes is impossible
- Official Git Documentation: Git quick reference guide
- Git Visual Cheat Sheet: An interesting visual Git cheat sheet
- GitHub Cheat Sheet: A collection of cool hidden and not so hidden features of Git and GitHub
Quickly generate web components to copy and paste into your code
- V0 React Component Generator: Quickly generate React components with AI
- Social Media Sharing Buttons: Super fast and easy Social Media Sharing Buttons. No JavaScript. No tracking
- SVG Backgrounds: Create customizable, high quality SVG backgrounds
- Cookie Consent: Generate GDPR compliant banners for websites
Optimize your image assets
- ImageOptim: Removes bloated metadata. Saves disk space & bandwidth by compressing images without losing quality
- ImageOptim-CLI: ImageOptim-CLI exists because the current benchmarks suggest that ImageOptim, ImageAlpha and JPEGmini currently outperform those alternatives over lossless and lossy optimizations. A self-contained executable binary, you don't need Node.js installed to use ImageOptim-CLI
- FileOptimzer: Smart detection of file types by analyzing its contents, no matter of what extension they have
What developers code in
- Visual Studio Code: Industry standard. Reliable code editor that's free, open source and runs everywhere
- Notepad++: A good Notepad replacement, decent code editor
My recommended and curated list of VSCode extensions
- TBA
Developer Command Line Interface (CLI) tools
- Windows Terminal: Excellent Windows terminal
- iTerm2: Excellent MacOS terminal
Base HTML stuff for hitting the floor running.
- HTML5 Boilerplate: Rapidly build fast, robust, and adaptable web apps or sites. Kick-start your project with the combined knowledge and effort of 100s of developers, all in one little package. Comes with all the modern batteries you'd need
- HEAD: A list of everything that could go in the
<head>of your document
Components for aiding in UX / UI features.
- lightgallery.js: Full featured JavaScript image & video gallery. No dependencies
- Popper.js: Awesome looking tooltips / popovers. Easily position tooltips, popovers or anything just just a line of code
- SweetAlert2: Beautiful popup boxes. A beautiful, responsive, customizable, accessible replacment for Javascript's Popup boxes
- Fullpage.js: Create full screen web pages fast and simple. A simple and easy to use library to create fullscreen scrolling websites (also known as single page websites or onepage sites). It allows the creation of fullscreen scrolling websites, as well as adding some landscape sliders inside the sections of the site
- GSAP (GreenSock Animation Platform): High-performance animations. Ultra high-performance, professional-grade animation for the modern web. GSAP is a JavaScript library for creating high-performance animations that work in every major browser
- D3.js: A library for visualizing data using the web. 3 combines powerful visualization and interaction techniques with a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation, giving you the full capabilities of modern browsers and the freedom to design the right visual interface for your data
Common JavaScript libraries to make your life easier.
- React: React is a library for web and native user interfaces
- Moment.js: Date and Time manipulation. Parse, validate, manipulate, and display dates and times.
- jQuery: Fast, small, and feature-rich JS library. Makes things like HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax much simpler with an easy-to-use API that works across a multitude of browsers.
- Lodash: JS Modularity, performance & extras. A modern JavaScript utility library delivering modularity, performance & extras. Lodash makes JavaScript easier by taking the hassle out of working with arrays, numbers, objects, strings, etc.
Responsive front-end CSS frameworks for the modern web.
- Tailwind: Use utility classes to control the layout, color, spacing, typography, shadows, and more to create a completely custom component design
- Bootstrap: Build responsive, mobile-first projects on the web with the world's most popular front-end component library
- Materialize: A modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design
Mobile frameworks ideal for hybrid mobile Android / iOS apps.
- Framework 7: Full featured HTML framework for building iOS & Android apps
- Ionic: Build amazing apps in one codebase, for any platform, with the web
Email template boilerplates for modern email clients.
- Email Boilerplate: The email boilerplate for sending out nicely formatted messages
- Foundation for Emails: Responsive Email Templates built by Zurb
- Responsive Email Template: A free simple responsive HTML email template
- Bulletproof email buttons: Generate solid buttons for email using progressively enhanced VML and CSS
- Transactional Email Templates: Responsive transactional HTML email templates
Theme development with WordPress.
- WordPress Boilerplate Theme (HTML 5 Blank): Powerful template for rapidly building your WordPress projects
- Sage: Sage is a WordPress starter theme with a modern development workflow.
General resource for PHP development
- PHP: PHP Development language
- Composer: Dependency manager for PHP
- Awesome PHP: A curated list of amazingly awesome PHP libraries, resources and shiny things.
Open source PHP Frameworks for building web applications
- Laravel: A PHP Framework with all the batteries included
Open source PHP CMSes
- WordPress: The most popular CMS in the world
- Drupal: Drupal bundled with additional projects such as themes, modules, libraries, and installation profiles. They give you a head start on building the type of site you need
PHP Libraries to assist in development.
- Carbon: DateTime Library. Carbon is a simple API extension for the DateTime. It enhances the class with some useful methods for working with dates and time.
- Goutte: Web Scraping Library. Goutte is a library for scraping websites and extracting data. It provides a nice API that makes it easy to select specific elements from the remote pages.
- Validation: Input Validation Library. The most awesome validation engine ever created for PHP.
- TCPDF: PDF Generation Library. PHP library for generating PDF documents on-the-fly.
- Google APIs Client Library for PHP: The Google API Client Library enables you to work with Google APIs such as Google+, Drive, or YouTube on your server.
- Geocoder: Geocoder is a PHP library which helps you build geo-aware applications by providing a powerful abstraction layer for geocoding manipulations.
- PHPWord: A pure PHP library for reading and writing word processing documents
- PHPSpreadsheet: A pure PHP library for reading and writing spreadsheet files
- Valitron: Easy Validation That Doesn't Suck: Valitron is a simple, minimal and elegant stand-alone validation library with NO dependencies. Valitron uses simple, straightforward validation methods with a focus on readable and concise syntax.
- EmailValidator: PHP Email validator library
- reCAPTCHA PHP client library: PHP client library for reCAPTCHA, a free service to protect your website from spam and abuse
- libphonenumber for PHP: HP version of Google's phone number handling library
- TwitterOAuth: The most popular PHP library for Twitter's OAuth REST API.
- php-emoji - Process Emoji in PHP: A PHP Emoji conversion library
- device-detector: The Universal Device Detection library will parse any User Agent and detect the browser, operating system, device used (desktop, tablet, mobile, tv, cars, console, etc.), brand and model.
- stripe-php: PHP library for the Stripe API.
- BotMan: BotMan is a framework agnostic PHP library that is designed to simplify the task of developing innovative bots for multiple messaging platforms, including Slack, Telegram, Microsoft Bot Framework, Nexmo, HipChat, Facebook Messenger and WeChat.
- NotificationPusher: Standalone PHP library for easy devices notifications push.
APIs worth using in your next or current projects
- Public APIs: A collective list of free APIs for use in web development.
Wordpress development boilerplates, libraries and tools.
- WordPress Plugin Boilerplate: A standardized, organized, object-oriented foundation for building high-quality WordPress Plugins.
Wordpress development tools to streamline development
- Bedrock: A boilerplate with Composer, easier configuration, and an improved folder structure
- wp-cli: WP-CLI is the command-line interface for WordPress. You can update plugins, configure multisite installs and much more, without using a web browser.
- Search-Replace-DB: This script was made to aid the process of migrating PHP and MySQL based websites.
- WordPress Toolbox: A collection of Wordpress code snippets
Drupal development tools to streamline development
- Drush: A command line shell for Drupal