I was frustrated to say the least, but knew I could not have been the first one.  I found an archived email sent by Thomas Koch to the VIM mailing list describing some of the problems with the management of scripts and the improvements he would like to see made.  Thomas also created a wiki page to organize his proposed relauch.

The great thing is that the website is built using PHP and MySQL.  That means I can lend a hand to make these changes happen.  I really don't want to see this project die off, so I have emailed the vim@vim.org mailing list prompting for more action.

I decided a few weeks ago that I would try to find the tools we liked in Zend Studio that were missing from VIM.  I know we didn't need things like version control integration or project management plugins.  The Linux command line is more than capable of handling these sorts of tasks.  And since most of us at work are Bash enthusiasts, doing it on the command line is often much faster.  What we needed were things like DocBlock generation and tag browsing.

I got started by referencing Thomas Kock's post on using VIM as a PHP IDE.  We already use cscope, so all the plugins he listed were pretty easy to introduce into our workflow.  The CodeSniffer integration is really sexy.  I did run into a problem with phpDocumentor for Vim.  It seems that Tobias Schlitt is no longer supporting that plugin.  Due to the ineffeciencies of vim.org, I moved the code over to github.

I don't think VIM is the right PHP editor for everyone, but it has been working fairly well for us.