concrete5 supports all major browsers as long as you're working with an up-to-date version. Please note: you can create a website which is viewable with an outdated browser, but the in-context editing system won't work correctly, unless you're using a modern browser.

Whether you use Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Internet Explorer doesn't really matter. concrete5 works with any recent browser with JavaScript capability, but it's recommended to use the latest browser version since most concrete5 community members test new releases with the newest browsers.

Since we're going to edit PHP files you'll need a text editor. The requirements are quite small; you can pick almost any text editor you want. Just make sure it does support PHP syntax highlighting. Here are some possible editors:

There are a lot more text editors, as mentioned previously; you can use almost any editor you want. If you're familiar with another product, just go with it. You won't find anything in this book where you need a special text editor feature.

The same with the file archive utility, there are plenty of tools out there and if you want, you can use the in-built extraction utility of Windows or Mac OS. If you're looking for something more advanced, you can go with 7-Zip at http://www.7-zip.org/ or IZArc at http://www.izarc.org/; both are free and do a good job.

Once more, there are lots of choices. You'll have to change file permissions later, so make sure your FTP client includes this option. A powerful and well known client is FileZilla, http://filezilla-project.org/. It's free as well and has a lot more features than we need.