Debugging WordPress themes with Xdebug, real time html output

Hi I’m using XDEBUG to debug my WordPress code, is it possible to view the page building up in the browser while debugging? At the moment the page just hangs until the debugging process is finished then displays the fully rendered page. Ideally I’d like to see the page building up bit by bit as I debug through the theme’s code.

Just an Idea – I did not test this.

Worth a try would be to play around with your PHP settings:

; Implicit flush tells PHP to tell the output layer to flush itself      
; automatically after every output block. This is equivalent to calling the PHP   
; function flush() after each and every call to print() or echo() and each and 
; every HTML block. Turning this option on has serious performance implications 
; and is generally recommended for debugging purposes only. 
implicit_flush = On

I would also recommend to disable gzip and look for other output_buffering related options in php.ini.

Then you should be able to set break-points in the different rendering stages of your theme.