Recommend a guide to catching plugin errors, please?

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I’m working on a small plugin and on some WP installations it throws up the white screen of death.

I’m new to this, and would like to know if there is a decent guide out to there (so far my googling over the white screen of death hasn’t turned up anything for developers), or some best practices I should be following to make sure I catch errors or avoid anything foolish.

Any and all links or tips would be massively appreciated.

1 Answer
1

A white screen of death is typically a fatal PHP error, most of the time due to a syntax error. This often sends no errors to the browser.

Some things you can do:

Turn on PHP error_log in your php.ini file and set the error_reporting levels.
http://php.net/manual/en/errorfunc.configuration.php

Error info: http://www.php.net/manual/en/errorfunc.constants.php

Alternatively or in combination you can turn this on in your wp-config as well (from wordpress codex).
http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php

/**
 * This will log all errors notices and warnings to a file called debug.log in
 * wp-content only when WP_DEBUG is true
 */

define('WP_DEBUG', true); // false
if (WP_DEBUG) {
  define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);
  define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false);
  @ini_set('display_errors',0);
}

Turn on WordPress debugging and saved queries, (wp debug is same as above example) in your wp-config.php.

define('WP_DEBUG', true);
define('SAVEQUERIES', true);

And install the debug bar, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/debug-bar/

I also recommend using something like xDebug,

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