PHP's error reporting is not great out of the box, but luckily it provides us with a way to set up our own custom error handling. This book gets stuck into how to do error handling well, with practical examples and downloadable code. We also take a broader look at strategies and best practices.

What you will learn

- all about PHP’s built-in error reporting systems

- An approach to error reporting strategy (what we present to the user vs what goes to the developer)

- What information to include in PHP error reprts (and how to only include the useful stuff)

- sample code for informative admin emails

- Common pitfalls for admin emails, for example: how to throttle the admin email rate so you don’t fill up your email inbox

- Third-party tools to help with reporting

- And which pieces of code are most likely to fail unexpectedly (so we can make our reporting focus on at-risk code).

This book is for you if:

You've ever got phone calls or emails because a site you built is having a problem

You want to improve the error handling on your existing sites

You want your next site to have better error reporting

You want to improve your development and debugging workflow

You want to know about errors before your clients and customers do

Contents

Chapter 1: Definitions

Chapter 2: Built-in reporting mechanisms

Chapter 3: Strategies

Chapter 4: Custom Error Reporting

Chapter 5: Custom Error Reporting revisited: much better email reports

Chapter 6: Offline Error Reporting

Chapter 7: Trapping and Treating Errors

Appendix A: (Mostly) Completed GLPErrorReport Class

Resources

Also Included:

- Free downloads:

- A lightweight Error Reporting System that sends email reports.

- And an advanced PHP Class that is designed to send email reports in regular digests, and with duplicates filtered out!