Re: web IDE

If you're looking for an easy-to-use IDE then Dreamweaver is a good choice even though it's not web-based. Given what you've said about how new you are to all of this it would probably be worth your money to purchase it. For something that is PHP-based there are PEAR packages you might use, i.e. HTML_Quickform. IMO it's not quite so simple as using Dreamweaver (in fact it's not really an IDE), but it is free and helps build forms (especially helpful for multi-page forms). I'm not aware of anything that fits your requirements exactly... so make your choice.

One problem I'm having at the moment is how to create a file from an html form. I have a php script that uses fopen() to create a new file. This works fine when I call it from bash but I don't know how to do it using a button on an html form. Any ideas?

Click a button and create a file? Well you need a name / value for the submit button to do this and whenever your $_GET or $_POST have this variable you can do the file-creation stuff.