With a lot of important changes in Drupal 8, use of advanced integrated development environments becomes essential to keep being productive and continue shipping products for customers, though Drupal 6 and 7 developers can gain from IDEs quite a lot as well. Drupal 8 architecture brings developers a lot of improvements (with some pain a bit before you learn) - OOP, a lot of changes in API and core, introduces Symfony2 components and Twig template engine - so it definitely looks like quite a learning curve which can be flattered by the right development tool.

Using the right IDE you don't feel pain navigating between hooks, methods, documentation, you get code completion for everything you need, and debugging can be done right in place. Just think of an IDE which deeply understands your Drupal code providing context-dependent code completion, safe refactorings, respects PHPDoc and integrates debugger, PHPUnit and many other tools. With this deep understanding, you can use your tool to navigate between hooks implementations and invocations, Drupal API & core methods, and instantly get quick documentation for everything you are working on! Adding to that built-in Drupal Coding Standard, Drush tool which is run right from the IDE, and much more - and getting the ideal environment to make Drupal developer as productive as possible.

This is a deep hands-on session on PhpStorm IDE which has been quite trending development tool in Drupal community lately (and now supports all actual versions of Drupal - 6, 7 and 8). We'll be talking about general tasks to be performed in the IDE (code completion, snippets, project creation, VCS, unit tests, debugging, etc). Then we'll switch to Drupal modules development and see how easily IDE can make developer's life easier with hooks support, integrated Drush, built-in Drupal coding standards and using Coder tool inside the IDE, working with documentation, and configuring Drupal issue tracker to show your tasks right in the editor. We'll also focus on Drupal 8 related features, such as Twig, new API, and more.