One of the areas of WordPress that, in my opinion, is not covered by a lot of quality plugins, is developer-oriented – debugging. There are maybe two good plugins available right now, and I have recently decided to change that. My new free plugin for WordPress, called DebugPress has been recently released.
Way back in 2011, I have created my first debugging plugin. It was fairly limited, but, it helped me a lot in learning how WordPress work, and I used that debugger for a while. It was part of the GD Press Tools Pro plugin. In 2015, I started working on GD Press Tools Pro 5.0, and I decided to completely rewrite the debugger.
And, when the plugin was released, it had a new Debugger that is the basis for the development going forward and will shape to what it is today. The debugger was part of the Pro version only, and it has grown a lot since 2015, and unfortunately, only a limited number of WordPress users had the chance to use it.
Very often, I get questions about the development process I use, and very often, that involves the tools I use, and one of the most important tools is Debugger, especially with WordPress and PHP. So, while I always recommend my plugin and debugger, that is not that simple, because the plugin was not free.
Last year I decided to create a new and free plugin that will have full Debugger included. The problem was the integration of the Debugger inside the GD Press Tools Pro, and it was not simple code migration to the new plugin. While I was thinking about what to do, other things were more important, and time flew by. But, finally, a few weeks ago, I had some free time available, so I started the work on the new plugin.
Surprisingly, the work took only 4 days. I had to transfer a bit more code than I anticipated, and I had to remove some features that required other GD Press Tools Pro features. But, I also decided to improve various things and add some new features as well.
I was a bit lucky to get the ‘debug.press‘ domain name, and the plugin was officially named DebugPress. The plugin is free, available on WordPress.org and it is on GitHub, so anyone can contribute.
Check out the plugin website, download it and test it out, and let me know what you think about the plugin if you have found any issues if you have any suggestions to improve it.