Update: See my guide on How to make your own Zend Framework Resource Plugin

Building Facebook applications with Zend Framework, I've needed a debug console that can shows messages even in a Facebook canvas page, through an ajax request or a redirect.

For this purpose I've build a custom plugin for ZF that fits the need: it will sit under your pages and shows all your dumped object, messages and queries.

MadaConsole debug console

Usage is really simple: copy in your library and add the plugin in your Boostrap or application.ini.
For a detailed guide see below.

Features

• Trace custom messages easily: debug("A debug message");
• Dump variables easily in your code with the pass-through function:
  Before: array_count_values($arr); After: array_count_values(debug($arr));
• Shows the queries executed by your Zend_Table
• Shows debug messages even through redirects or ajax requests

Install

Installing the plugin is simple:

1. Download the archive: MadaConsole
2. Unzip the library folder of the archive in the library folder of your Zend Framework application

Then you can configure it with two methods: through your application.ini or in the Bootsrap class.

Method1: application.ini

Add those lines after [development : production]:

pluginPaths.MadaConsole = "MadaConsole"
resources.console = true


Method 2: Bootstrap class

Add this method:

Usage

Now in your code you can do:

With the pass-through functionality you can simply add the debug() function in your existing statements with ease: $var = debug(my_func($foo));

To see the debug output when you do an ajax request, you can open a page of your choice in another browser window: the debug console will show all the messages site-wide.

Downloads

MadaConsole plugin
MadaConsole example Zend Framework project

How the debug console looks like

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 11:32 am and is filed under PHP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.