Bugs happen. When they do, error reporting is needed to squash them. Here is how to turn it on.

Look for these line and/or add them to your WordPress wp-config.php file. This file is located in your WordPress home directory.

// Turn on Debugging
define('WP_DEBUG', TRUE); 

// Yes, log errors please
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', TRUE );

// Let's not show errors on the page.
define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', FALSE ); 

Now, when things go bad for WordPress, you can see why by visiting this file:

http://[your-website]/wp-content/debug.log

Now go a step further and turn on PHP Error Reporting. Add this snippet next.

// Turn on Error Reporting
ini_set("log_errors", TRUE);

// Report ALL issues, not just the really bad ones.
error_reporting (E_ALL);

// Let's not show errors on the page.
ini_set ('display_errors', FALSE);

This creates error logs in the folder that they’ve happened in. For WordPress theme and plugin issues, we generally are interested in this file:

http://[your-website]/wp-content/error_log

It’s important to point out that once the bugs are squashed, you probably should turn error reporting off. To do this, simply change each TRUE to FALSE.

Tags: debugging, error log files, error reporting