EDIT: What I propose here doesn't actually fix it, it still fails when there's a greater-than sign inside an if statement. I have spent over 8 hours trying to get this to work and that is too much, so I am giving up. If you find a solution, please email it to me.

I use this script to get rainbow parentheses in Vim:

• https://github.com/kien/rainbow_parentheses.vim
• http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3772

It colors nested parentheses like this:

Unfortunately, it doesn't work with PHP, because the PHP syntax file only allows its own syntax regions to appear inside the <?php and ?> tags. The fix is simple:

1. Copy the 'system' php syntax file (usually /usr/local/share/vim/vim73/syntax/php.vim) to your personal ~/.vim/syntax folder (create it if it does not exist).

1. Edit ~/.vim/syntax/php.vim, find the line that starts with syn cluster phpClTop and add level16 to the end of the 'contains' list on that line. If you have set g:rbpt_max in your .vimrc, then you will need to change the "16" to that value.