Debug Bar

One of the goals at our meetup two weeks ago was to find ways to improve the developer experience on WordPress.com VIP. As a first step, we’re rolling out the Debug Bar to all VIP developers.

If you have Administrator access to a VIP site and have read- or write-access to the VIP SVN repo, the Debug Bar will be automatically enabled for you.

You can use the Debug Bar for quick troubleshooting of your sites such as examining how WordPress interprets the page request and the resulting WP_Query object. You will also get a summary of all queries on the page and a breakdown of any remote requests, which is very useful in tracking and fixing down slow performing pieces of your sites.

(If you haven’t already, we also recommend installing the Debug Bar in your development environment.)

What else can we add to to the Debug Bar to make it more useful? Let us know in the comments below.

7 thoughts on “Debug Bar”

  1. It doesn’t work too well ATM. I don’t see any queries in Query Summary tab:
    1 queries for 0.00ms »

    I realize that it’s probably due to batcache. Also it would be really nice to see not only the main WP_Query object.
    The other idea is to display prioritized list of all actions and hooks (sometimes particular filter could screw things up and having that list on per request basis could drastically decrease debug time)

    • Batcahe is disabled for logged-in views so probably has nothing to do with the issue you’re seeing. Probably some other bug; we’ll take a look 🙂

      > Also it would be really nice to see not only the main WP_Query object.

      Yep, great idea and something that’s already on our list.

      > Display prioritized list of all actions and hooks

      Could be very useful as well.

      Thanks!

  2. Mo, thanks for this! I see us using this a lot.

    Questions:

    1) Is that # of queries and page-generation-time-vs-vip-average in the top right? If that second figure is for the current page generation time, how affected could that figure be by all the debugging? Is it possible to also show a page-generation-time running average for non-logged-in users?

    2) Right now it says WP_DEBUG_OFF and no further information – What do I need to do to turn that on?

    • > Is that # of queries and page-generation-time-vs-vip-average in the top right? If that second figure is for the current page generation time, how affected could that figure be by all the debugging?

      It’s “# of queries / page-gen time for current page”. It’s affected to some extent by debugging but not significantly.

      > Is it possible to also show a page-generation-time running average for non-logged-in users?

      We’ll likely be beefing up the page-gen graph in the VIP Dashboard to include more aggregate data.

      > Right now it says WP_DEBUG_OFF and no further information – What do I need to do to turn that on?

      Turning on WP_DEBUG in production is generally not a good idea 🙂 We’ll enable the “Notices / Error ” panel instead. Is there stuff that WP_Debug does that you’re looking for?

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