An unobtrusive debugging tool for WordPress

Matthew Batchelder

Have you ever wanted to get debug output sent to you from WordPress without interrupting the flow of the page? 
Do you ever wish you could get debug output from other users’ sessions so you don’t have to:
<ul>
<li>Log in as them</li>
<li>Asking them to look at debug output themselves (bleh)</li>
<li>Or try in vain to re-create their issue</li>
</ul>
This plugin allows you to send debug messages via UDP to a <a href="https://github.com/borkweb/jabberbot" rel="nofollow ugc">Jabber Bot</a> that can then route 
the debug information to your IM client.
Note: This plugin sends the messages via UDP. The receiving end doesn’t necessarily need to be a Jabber bot…it could be anything you want 
(e.g. email bot, logger, whatever). My implementation is a Jabber Bot on my local dev environment 🙂
<h4>Usage</h4>
To send debug messages, simply call:
<pre><code>do_action( 'debug_robot', $message [, $target ]);
</code></pre>
<ul>
<li>$message: Message to send to your jabber bot.</li>
<li>$target: (optional) Email address that your jabber bot will route the message to.</li>
</ul>
To receive debug messages, you will need to have:
<ul>
<li>Your <a href="https://github.com/borkweb/jabberbot" rel="nofollow ugc">Jabber Bot</a> installed and configured.</li>
<li>The Jabber Bot must be running.</li>
<li>You must have friended your robot’s jabber account with another jabber account (e.g. your Google account).</li>
<li>You must be signed into Google Talk in some way shape or form so that your jabber bot can IM you.</li>
</ul>
Note: If your Jabber Bot isn’t running, no worries. UDP doesn’t wait for a response so it won’t impact your WordPress instance…you just won’t get the messages that 
are sent until your bot is running 🙂
<h3>Credits</h3>
This code was largely written by <a href="https://github.com/abackstrom" rel="nofollow ugc">@abackstrom</a> with some additions by me while we worked at <a href="https://github.com/PlymouthState" rel="nofollow ugc">@PlymouthState</a>. I then ported it into a WordPress plugin.

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