I see PHP staying viable for quite a while. Aside from Perl and ASP, it doesn't have much competition, and considering the Zend engine's cross-platform compatibility, it makes it more appealing than ASP in my opinion. PHP 6 is shaping up to be a good indicator of its staying power. And besides, you and a thousand others would be minus a nice forum if PHP goes to the wayside anytime soon. (notepad all the time)
The good thing is, that if you work on something like an archive site, you are most likely going to have it database driven and PHP will only parse the results from the database (which runs mysql or mssql most likely). That way its pretty much bullet proof for the future no matter what happens. If SQL databases really die for some obscure reason, there will be something to convert them. Besides that im pretty sure php will stay at the top for a long time.
i use a mix of a older dreamweaver for design and ultraedit for direct code editing works fine for me and older versions are not so expensive then the latest dreamweaver with all whistles and bells
It's not going anywhere. It's basically a web-only Perl. While Perl is fantastic (the glue that holds everything together) PHP does do some stuff better (and some easier). For a site like this, you only need a handful of PHP scripts anyway. If something new comes out, just rewrite them. It's not a massive undertaking. Until I started doing a somewhat secret project at gamengai which deals with actual user accounts, balances and other shit, gamengai was less than 25 scripts... and only about 4 of them were of any substantial length. And as for what editor I use: VIM
I have used Open Office, and Star Office as website makers. But I haven´t really coded them. Just played around with them. But you can also code with those two programs. And they aren´t the worst to use.