Resources to manage a PHP website [closed]

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I am a .net developer. A friend of mine is planning to outsource a website. He is getting quotes which are very cheap but the sites will be in php/msql. At this point he is not having any resource and that includes no development machine, no programmer or whatsoever (he only has some money to invest :)). Now he wants me to get involved in this project and manage the website once the outsourcing company hands us over the application (including source-code).

Till now I have worked with VS / ASP.NET / IIS and VSS. I haven't worked a bit with php/mysql but given google / SO and little time I will be able to manage.

So I need help on identifying:

1: What and all I need on my development machine. Because after the application is handed over to me, I will be responsible to fix minor bugs and minor modifications. For major addition of new features we might go back to outsourcing(same or different company).

2: Anything specific to web-hosting I need to be aware of because ultimately I will be responsible to find host provi开发者_运维技巧der and manage the website.

3: Anything that can help me get going fast on php.

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Editor: PHPStorm or Eclipse are popular choices.

Test Server: XAMPP which you can install locally on windows.

Version Control: Subversion (choose whichever client and server you find free).

Hosting: I like site5 for cheap shared hosting. Depends on the site's needs however.

Learn phpMyAdmin. It's a simple to use MySQL database administration tool that's already included on most lamp stacks. Allows you to set up tables, run queries, backup, etc.

I like XDebug for remote debugging and profiling. Most major IDEs are integrated with it.

To learn the code, just use the PHP online documentation. It's pretty good.

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1. Make sure you have a similar setup as to what the outsourcing company used. Mainly: OS, Webserver/version, PHP version, MySQL version. Differences are minimal but they do crop up every now and then.

2. Don't skimp on price. If your hosting plan is cheap you will get exactly that.

3. Read their code and try to understand it (PHP is very easy to read). If you can't understand it they probably did a very bad job ;)

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Suggest hitting godaddy.com for your hosting needs for most small-medium solutions. While it's true that you can host a server in your basement, it's generally more trouble than it's worth; you can buy a domain name and a year of hosting for a hundred dollars and save yourself dozens of hours of headache and downtime. While there are places that will host your site for free, a lot of times you get what you pay for.

Once the site is developed it's a (relatively) simple matter to copy-paste the site files and database; your outsource company can probably deploy their product to your godaddy server in a matter of minutes.

For your dev machine, I recommend Eclipse with the PDT plugin as your editor (download the "php version" of eclipse). I strongly recommend svn or some other source control. It's very useful to have apache and mysql installed on your dev box along with your site and db so you can test changes locally. When developing, it's good practice to test on at least IE, firefox and chrome as they're the most popular browsers at the moment.

php.net is the equivalent of the java.sun.com/reference/api/ and is searchable by function name. It also has a manual; start here http://www.php.net/manual/en/ but for small edits, if you're familiar with any c-syntax language and html you shouldn't have a problem. Just don't forget your dollar signs and semicolons.