Busy schedules, long to do lists, and deadlines make it tough for developers to get familiar with some of the advanced features their tools provide. This is a shame, because some features, like Eclipse Templates, can really reduce coding time and errors.
You already know that Eclipse PDT provides autocompletion and hints for PHP's built in functions. In addition, commenting your code with PHPDoc adds autocompletion and hinting for your application's classes, methods, and variables. If you haven't already discovered, Eclipse PDT also provides autocompletion of PHP's control structures, class definitions, and methods through code templates.
Eclipse PDT Templates
The PHP Developer Tools plug in provides several templates for all of PHP's control structures (if/else, for, foreach, while, switch, etc.) and more. Fire up Eclipse and take a look at Preferences > PHP > Templates. Here are all of the predefined templates available.