Moving ahead from our last post, I want to present the beta version of the Helthe WordPress Error Monitoring plugin (available here). The overall goal of the plugin is to offer relevant error monitoring for your production WordPress site.
A debugging tale
When debugging WordPress (or any other programming problem for that matter), what do you usually do? You start using your badass Google-fu to find a solution and, when that fails, you post on support forums, WordPress Answers (Stack Overflow) or another medium, but I am getting ahead of myself.
Before that you need to know what to look for and that’s usually where the problem lies especially with WordPress. Unless you’re dealing with a fatal error (White Screen of Death), WordPress is generally pretty silent about issues. This is by design.
Great experience for the users. Hell for supporting them.
This is plugin is a serious attempt at helping you with that. I have already done a good effort to capture a lot of the known errors (and some new ones as well), but having you use it will help me find additional ways to help you (and find bugs) when you need it the most.
What are you getting?
I don’t plan on doing a feature by feature explanation, but I wanted to highlight a few things that I hope you will find useful.
Leveraging existing plugins
The first thing I did is consolidate some of the good stuff from the Core Control plugin and Deprecated Log Notices which do not seem to be actively worked on anymore. Those were the two plugins I knew that helped for specific problems (let me know if you know others!).
With this, you’ll know if you’re using deprecated functions or calling functions wrong. However, the more interesting element is tracking errors from the HTTP API. Without diving to deep into it, the HTTP API is used by WordPress to handle communications with other web services. This includes wp-cron and errors with the API can be one of the reasons why your cron tasks (like schedule posts) do not run.
Termination Errors
This has the potential to be very useful. Have you ever had AJAX errors with WordPress? Those can be really annoying to solve since you can’t see the output. Well now, anytime WordPress terminates with an error, it will get logged in your error log. I haven’t seen anything like this before so I am hoping that this turns out to be very useful for you.
Image Editor Errors
Another common problem you can encounter is the image editor not working because you’re missing libraries for example. This is a scenario where you really won’t know unless you spend quite a bit of time poking around.
Admin Bar Support
Wondering if there were errors when your page rendered, you’ll be able to see all the errors that were logged by the plugin in the admin bar. This is just for site administrators.
And more!
There’s quite a few more things already under the hood and, as far as I know, there’s nothing another error plugin does that isn’t covered with this current beta version. I am not satisfied yet though. The same way you think of Akismet as your default spam solution, I want this to be a must-have for any serious WordPress professional.
I can’t do that without your help and feedback. Try it out and create issues whenever you have a production (or even development) problem that wasn’t caught by the plugin and caused you serious pain.
This is available to you for free
You won’t need to sign up for anything and you will get all the errors logged in the PHP error log. I think for this to be truly great for the community, all the features need to be available to everyone.
Where do Helthe fit in this?
Right now the plugin only writes to the PHP error log. When Helthe gets closer to the beta phase, there will be an option to add an API key that will let errors be sent to the service. The purpose of Helthe is to make error monitoring and management more convenient for you so if you’re ok with looking through your error logs then you won’t need anything else to be functional.
As always, feel free to leave a comment below or discuss on Hacker News.
P.S. If you’d like to keep up to date with my progress with Helthe, leave your email below!
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