Drupal debugging - practice and theory

One of the most valuable assets of a development company is it’s developers. One of the most important characteristics of a developer is their problem solving skills. While developing a web page (or any other program), a significant amount of time is spent on debugging. If you can do it effectively, you can shorten the development time and tackle more complex problems.

When it comes to debugging, you can select from a broad toolset. Knowing these tools and choosing the appropriate one for a specific task is important. We will chose a real life problem and present practical solution in multiple ways, using various tools and techniques. While demonstrating one solution, we will cover its theoretical and technical background by looking under the hood.

Key points:

• How we debug, a little theory.
• PHP language support for debugging, and how Drupal core augments this.
• The most commonly used development modules and what additional functionality they provide.
• How browsers help with debugging (Development toolbars, FireBug, etc.).
• Using command line tools to speed up development.
• Using xDebug, and a few words about IDE supports.
• Looking beyond the code: database, web server, php configs, error logs.
• How we can discretely debug a site and avoid common pitfalls (email rerouting, sandboxing).