Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Author: Tom (Page 29 of 426)

Resources, Week of 25 July 2021

Most of the resources and articles I’m sharing this week are the usual type but there are a few, such as original Kindles no longer being able to access the web via 3G, that are an interesting read mainly because I remember when the device came out and that was a specifically killer feature for me.

I also started working on a series on how to use Ray to debug features in WordPress. I cover this later in the article.

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Debugging WordPress with Ray, Part 1

TL;DR: This post gives a high-level overview of what kind of app Ray is and how to set it up for use in WordPress.


For as long as I’ve been involved with WordPress development, I’ve consistently seen developers – myself included – consistently use print_r and var_dump whenever they need to see what’s going on within their code.

And this is okay for smaller data structures like looks at objects, arrays, and so on. Then on the other end of the debugging spectrum, if you need to step through code to see what arguments are being passed into a given function from where and with what value, then using something like Xdebug is incredibly helpful.

Until recently, I didn’t think there was middle ground. But then I found Ray and I’ve been using it ever since.

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