When I debug code, I find that a debugger is a very powerful tool. With a debugger you can set breakpoints, step through code, watch variables, do a stack trace, and much, much more. The eclipse PDT + XDebug offers a PHP debugger that you can use for free. It also offers a full PDT IDE (for editing, “building”, and debugging your PHP projects), but I use eclipse+PDT+XDebug only as a debugger since