When I search and read code about time and date problems developers have, I noticed that a lot of people still use the old PHP functions like date(), time() or strtotime(). What about using the class DateTime instead? DateTime can do all the usual date and time operations you could ask for, and even more. Using DateTime can save a lot of time when you have to do simple, or more complex operations on dates.

PhpStorm is my favorite IDE for coding in PHP: pretty stable, you can do a lot with it. A shed load of stuff in fact. Even coding! The guys from Jetbrains tried to integrate every useful tools for a web developer in one software and, I have to say, it is pretty well done! You can configure easily a debugger, using a terminal, sending requests to your remote or local databases.