Chris Jean

<p><strong>WP Developer Assistant</strong> is a WordPress plugin developed by a WordPress developer for WordPress developers.</p>
<ul>
<li>Have you ever needed to run a query when you didn’t have access to phpMyAdmin or SSH?</li>
<li>Don’t you hate it when you need to upload a plugin, theme, or other file and don’t have FTP access?</li>
<li>Have you ever wondered where that action or filter hook gets called?</li>
<li>Want to enable errors while hiding them from everyone else?</li>
<li>Wouldn’t it be great if you could output a full listing of PHP global variable values on each page so debugging would be easier?</li>
<li>Ever wanted to modify one of those serialized options?</li>
<li>Would you like to quickly see a full list of defined constants?</li>
</ul>
<p>It’s thoughts like these that caused me to make this plugin. WP Developer Assistant is the first WordPress plugin of its kind. It essentially is a toolkit that makes life as a WordPress developer easier.</p>
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Customizable enabling of PHP errors that only show for your user.</li>
<li>Display values of PHP’s built-in global variables (_POST, _REQUEST, _FILE, _ENV, etc) on each page.</li>
<li>Easily modify Options table values, including serialized data.</li>
<li>View a full list of all the add_action, do_action, add_filter, and apply_filters function calls complete with information on function names, priorities, number of accepted arguments, source file name, and file line number.</li>
<li>Quickly execute queries with the Run Query tool.</li>
<li>Show phpinfo().</li>
<li>View a comprehensive list of all the defined named constants, their current value, the declared value, the source file name of the definition, and the file line number of the definition.</li>
<li>Quickly and easily upload files to any place inside your WordPress installation. The uploader will even automatically extract archives to the destination directory.</li>
</ul>
<p>There are many more features planned for this plugin. For more information about this plugin and its development, visit the <a href="http://blog.realthemes.com/wp-developer-assistant/" title="wp developer assistant home page" rel="nofollow ugc">WP Developer Assistant Home Page</a>.</p>
<h3>Requirements</h3>
<ul>
<li>PHP 4+</li>
<li>WordPress 2.2+</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version History</h3>
<ul>
<li>1.0.1 – 2008-06-26 – Initial release version</li>
<li>1.0.2 – 2008-06-26 – Slight modification that required a new version</li>
<li>1.0.3 – 2008-07-01 – Added support for PHP 4</li>
</ul>
<h3>More Information</h3>
<p>For more information about this plugin and its development, visit the <a href="http://blog.realthemes.com/wp-developer-assistant/" title="wp developer assistant home page" rel="nofollow ugc">WP Developer Assistant Home Page</a>.</p>


WP Developer Assistant

A plugin by a WordPress developer for WordPress developers.

freekmurze

<p><a href="https://myray.app" rel="nofollow ugc">Ray</a> is a beautiful, lightweight desktop app that helps you debug your app. There’s a <a href="https://myray.app" rel="nofollow ugc">free demo</a> available that can be unlocked with a <a href="https://spatie.be/products/ray" rel="nofollow ugc">license</a>.</p>
<p>After installing this plugin, you can use the <code>ray()</code> function to quickly dump stuff. Any variable(s) that you pass to <code>ray()</code> will be displayed.</p>
<p>Here some examples:</p>
<pre><code>ray('Hello world');

ray(['a' => 1, 'b' => 2])->color('red');

ray('multiple', 'arguments', 'are', 'welcome');

ray()->showQueries();
</code></pre>
<p>There are many other helper functions available on Ray that allow you to display things that can help you debug such as <a href="https://spatie.be/docs/ray/v1/usage/framework-agnostic-php-project#measuring-performance-and-memory-usage" rel="nofollow ugc">runtime and memory usage</a>, <a href="https://spatie.be/docs/ray/v1/usage/wordpress#showing-queries" rel="nofollow ugc">queries that were executed</a>, and much more.</p>
<h3>Full Documentation</h3>
<p>The extensive documentation can be found <a href="https://spatie.be/docs/ray" rel="nofollow ugc">here</a>.</p>
<p>It contains the <a href="https://spatie.be/docs/ray/v1/installation-in-your-project/wordpress" rel="nofollow ugc">installation instructions</a> for WordPress.</p>
<p>After it is installed you can use any of the <a href="https://spatie.be/docs/ray/v1/usage/framework-agnostic-php-project" rel="nofollow ugc">framework agnostic</a> and <a href="https://spatie.be/docs/ray/v1/usage/wordpress" rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress specific functions</a>.</p>


Just start using it and it saves me a lot of time & mistakes.
It takes only a few minutes to configure and helps me a lot in my daily work.

A very good solution for a quick & effucient debugging

Easy to use, great tool

It's much easier to use Ray than do all the error_log() and var_dump() calls on a page. You do not interrupt the flow (but you can pause it!) although receive all the needed information.

It's less powerful than Xdebug (although they have different purposes and use cases), but more flexible than printing debug output on a page/debug-bar/error log.

I highly recommend it.

Awesome tool to help developers debug the code

I was having trouble debugging an issue in my WP Cron task. It's quite complex and calls out to an external database in multiple places, so trying to figure out where the issue was started driving me insane.

As there was a PHP error in my code (I was trying to call a method on null) my logger wasn't picking up any issues, nor was it even logging sometimes and no exceptions were being thrown.

After installing Ray it worked right away with no setup (other than installing it with Composer). I then managed to find the issue in about 5 minutes because of Ray's simplicity and speed in giving you the output.

The UI is minimal which is perfect as nothing gets in your way while trying to debug and having everything formatted beautifully is a massive win over basic debug logging.

I bought a licence right away and would have happily paid 2x the price I did.

Amazingly simple yet powerful 👌

Where logging fails, Ray prevails


I've been using Ray for quite a while now and I have to say, it's one of the most useful dev tools I use! Gone are the days of spewing vardump and print_r to the screen!


Extremely helpful tool!


I use this plugin everyday while doing WordPress dev work.  It's a great tool.  


WP Developer Assistant vs Ray