When it comes to writing software, maintaining software, or simply trying to understand software, a debugger is one of the most powerful tools that we can use.
But when it comes to WordPress, it seems that it’s less common. Personally, I’m not sure why:
- I don’t know if it has to do with the nature of open-source,
- if has to do with the convenience of echo and var_dump that are built into the language,
- or if I’m just missing other developers who talk about it.
Regardless, if an IDE doesn’t have a built-in debugger, it’s not too difficult to set up Xdebug and get started using it. And once you do start using it, you learn much more about how a given piece of software performs regardless of if you wrote it or if someone else wrote it.
Yes, I’ve written on this topic before, but I recently stumbled across an article that I found to be a really good break down of how to shift one’s thinking into a mindset for debugging.
