With the release of Aptana Studio 2, developers at Aptana decided to drop their PHP / Smarty plugin in favor to PDT.  Since PDT in Aptana 2 never really worked, they made a decision to include native PHP support in the upcomming 3.0 release, but until then, here’s a way to install the original PHP / Smarty support from Aptana 1.x.

1. Go to “Help” / “Install new software …”

Aptana 2 PHP Support

2. To add a new update site click “Add” and enter the following URL http://update.aptana.com/install/php in the “Location” input – you can name it whatever you like. Click “OK” (if the update site doesn’t work, here a direct link to download the plugin; chose “Local” next to the “Location” input).

3. Select “PHP plugin Builds” / “Aptana 1.1 PHP Development Plugin” from the list and click “Next”.

Select the original Aptana PHP plugin

4. In the next step you need the accept the license agreement and click “Finish” to complete the wizard. To see the changes, restart your Aptana Studio and start (or open) your PHP project.

That’s it. Happy coding!