One of my personal gripes with ExpressionEngine is the bare bones debugging mode that comes bundled with it. Sure, it’s ok, it does provide useful data, but I think any developer would be hard pressed to truly defend it as a useful piece of technology. Recently though, I learned of a new technique from Chris Imrie he used in RequireJS that allowed me to fix things and make debugging ExpressionEngine a lot easier. The finished product is the EE Debug Toolbar.

The EE Debug Toolbar removes the default Profiler and Template Debugger and adds an unobtrusive toolbar onto your ExpressionEngine site. No longer do you have to scroll to the bottom of the page and dig through hundreds of lines of debug data. Now it’s all presented in a widget that’s displayed on every page at the bottom of the window. 

Right now, the EE Debug Toolbar will display included files broken up by type (eg; add-ons, EE core, first party modules, etc), timers, benchmark data, configuration data, all SQL statements, and the various system variables like the EE session and post, get, and cookie data.

This being a developer tool I’ve decided to release it to the community and obviously never charge for it. Please feel free to fork it to your hearts content and make all the pull requests possible. It’s in all of our best interests to make this thing good so get on it devs.

Lastly, I want to thank Chris Imrie for helping out as much as he did to make this thing bad ass. Chris is responsible for the underlying technique with which this project wouldn’t be possible but he’s also taken a stab at refactoring some core stuff to make it work better. Also, he proved himself to be a bad ass debugger with no quit in him.

You can get the EE Debug Toolbar on GitHub.