Jon Cairns wrote “Using Vim as a PHP IDE” blog post a good five years ago, but a lot of it still relevant and useful. It covers all the usual – syntax highlighting, syntax checking/linting, tags and auto-completion, coding style and mess detecting, unit testing and debugging. As many other similar guides, he links to a variety of plugins and provides configuration tips.
This is indeed a nice post! A lot of very practical examples to set up a good PHP IDE.
I wrote as well a guide how to create a PHP IDE with Vim. It lists and explain every plugins I use today: http://web-techno.net/vim-php-ide/