Debugging WordPress for Site Owners
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Beginning debugging for WordPress site owners. Presented at WordCamp Chicago 2018
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Debugging WordPress for Site Owners
- 3. My Background • I love WordPress • I’ve been working with it since 2008 • I worked for a non-profit for 7 years before coming to WooThemes, and then Automattic • I work in support for WooCommerce at Automattic
- 4. - Robert Burns “…The best-laid schemes o' mice an ‘men…”
- 5. Debugging
- 6. - Lord Melbourne “…the possession of great power necessarily implies great responsibility.”
- 7. Your face when your site white screens It’s going to be OK. Breathe.
- 8. Calm Your first instinct will be to panic, but you’re not doing anyone favors with that.
- 9. Find the problem It’s often buried *just* under the surface
- 10. Questions to ask • When exactly did you first notice the problem? • Have any updates been applied to your website recently? • Have you changed themes or made any design changes? • Have you installed any new plugins? • Is your problem happening in one browser, or all of them? • Do you see any specific error messages?
- 11. Sometimes the problem is right here.
- 12. Still not seeing anything? • Go to the page and use Firebug/Chrome Dev tools to look for anything out of the ordinary. • WP_DEBUG
- 14. WP_DEBUG • This constant is an amazing tool that can really clue you in to what’s going on in your site. You’ll start seeing PHP notices and also WordPress-generated debug messages, particularly deprecated function usage. • There’s also WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY and WP_DEBUG_LOG, which enable you to log these to a wp- content/debug.log file. • WP_DEBUG will often reveal potential problems in your code, such as unchecked indexes and undefined variables.
- 16. The Log • You can see that there is a lot of info here that looks daunting, but it can be broken down fairly simply. • It’s found in your wp-content folder. • The error messages will spell out where the error is coming from, so you can figure out your next steps.
- 17. Fix the problem Get to it!
- 18. Don’t do any of this live • Make sure you have a backup of your site • Perform all debugging (and updates and everything else) on a staging site.
- 19. Undo how you broke it • If you did something to break it, undo it • This is why you should have a backup to roll back to (if an update went awry, or your theme has outdated templates, etc.)
- 20. Start in a vacuum • Deactivate everything (all plugins except the one that you have the issue with) • Change the theme to the default WordPress theme (currently 2016) • Try to break it again
- 21. If it works • Start reactivating plugins/theme until you find the culprit, and leave that deactivated while you contact the dev, etc.
- 22. If it doesn’t • Try the exact setup on a completely different site to narrow it down to server configurations
- 23. Google • It’s not cheating. It’s how I know 95% of what I do.
- 24. Prevent It You don’t have to fix something that isn’t broken.
- 25. Known Issues • There are sometimes issues you will run into that a lot of other people have experienced. • Sometimes this is due to a bug that is fixed fairly quickly by the developers.
- 26. Possibly Probable • Some plugins and themes tend to cause a lot of conflicts with other plugins or themes. • The conflicting plugins aren’t necessarily because they are badly written. • A lot of times this happens because the themes or plugins do a lot of things.
- 27. Use Good Code • Pick plugins/themes with good support behind them. • A lot of times, this means premium code (you might have to pay for it)
- 28. Hosting • Never pick a host that starts you out on a PHP version that is lower than 5.6 • This can cause a lot of issues.
Editor's Notes
- It’s also a requirement that you include cat pictures, but that’s not really my style, so here is a picture of my Airedale.
- Ask about people using free plugins Free themes paid plugin free plugins Ask them about a site that might be having issues
- I feel your pain, Ben.
- You are in your best state of mind, and will do the most good while calm.
- The list above seems rather extensive, but typically if you think about it for a little bit, one or 2 will stick out at you.
- Tell them the story of the social blocker and submitting a ticket over the sharing feature not working on a news site.
- So once you have your site all backed up, and you’re working and testing on the staging site, we can move to next step.
- If you didn’t do anything/can’t find anything easy like that.
- An Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
- This is fairly broad, and I’m really not going to get a whole lot into this, but use good code. The most important part of this is making sure that the plugins are supported well, and especially have regular updates. If a plugin is not updated regularly, then you run risks with security, as well as compatibility. Premium code means that the authors have a very good reason (money) to provide support/updates, and stay on top of security vulnerabilities, etc. This is not disparaging the many awesome themes and plugins out there that are free, but just make sure that you vet the code.
- Well this is about the end of the presentation. Thanks for joining me.