Good news for WordPress developers is that debugging is built in – if you know how to switch it on!

An excellent post I found explaining the debugging feature can be found at: http://fuelyourcoding.com/simple-debugging-with-wordpress/

Turning on debugging basically boils down to setting some constants in your config.php file:

define('WP_DEBUG', true);
define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false);
@ini_set('display_errors',0);

With that set up, WordPress will create a file in your wp-contents directory called debug.log where all the debug messages will be output. With any luck your code will be perfect and it will be virtually empty.

Note: You shouldn’t really use debug in a live environment because the information logged may give away details of your site that aren’t usually visible. If you do have to use debug on a live site, make sure you delete the debug files after debugging, and set WP_DEBUG to false.

Of course, in your test environment you’re likely to want debugging on most of the time, but this leads to a couple of issues:

• The debugging file will keep growing unless you crop it every now and then
• If you run your development site as a multisite, the error codes for each site will all get mashed up together

What I do to make life a bit easier for myself is to create logs for each day and for each site, which makes it really easy to manage. In my theme’s function.php file I put the following code at the top:

if ( WP_DEBUG_LOG && WP_DEBUG ) {
  ini_set( 'error_log', WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/logs/'.sanitize_title(get_bloginfo()).'-'.date('Ymd').'.log' );
}

This sets up the log file name and location (if debugging is switched on) to /wp-contents/logs/sitename-date.log Just remember to put this code in each functions file for each theme, otherwise the debug data will be output to the default location.

Note: Don’t forget to create the logs directory first.

The Climate Run organisers wanted a site that would act both for information dissemination and for facilitating the event’s organisation.  This we gave them using the WordPress Content Management System.

The fixed top menu makes it easy to navigate to another page no matter where you are on the current page.  The multi-column layout, newspaper layout, lets the organisers pack in a lot of information into a page, but still keep it easy to read.  The site also allows for any number of galleries in a page to help with the visual engagement of the readers.

At the backend, we created a custom database so that the organisers could maintain a list of participating schools along with an Excel export feature, but behind a credential system to ensure that it is only visible by the people who have the permission to view the data.

Training was given online with a mixture of video demos and live training using Skype.

IDM wanted a site they could keep up to date themselves. The site we developed uses WordPress as the base CMS along with some customisations to make it work the way IDM wanted. Each Property page allows them to upload images and specify an address for the automatic Google Map.

To help the organisation of the site, we created CustomPost Types – a new feature coming with WordPress 3.0.  From the CMS side of things this makes it very easy to see the properties that are being Developed, Managed or Current Investments.

IDM also asked for some javascript for their tools page which does various property related calculations.