Plugins & Tools for WordPress Developers

I recently spent some time updating my growing collection of WordPress plugins, and during the process discovered some great resources for my WP “developer toolbox.” These are some super-useful plugins and tools for debugging, logging data, working with translation files, analyzing performance, and making otherwise difficult tasks efficient and manageable. May they serve you well!

WP Developer plugins & tools

Note: plugin descriptions quoted from their respective resources.

Debug Queries

“List query-actions only for admins; for debug purposes. See all queries on the frontend of the blog and find the slowest part. The plugin is perfect for WordPress developers, plugin and theme developers and site administrators who are trying to find out why the blog is too slow.”

Log Deprecated Notices

“Logs the usage of deprecated files, functions, and function arguments, and identifies where the deprecated functionality is being used.”

WordPress Hook Sniffer

“Simply Show Hooks gives you a simpler way to see WordPress hooks by displaying them in-line on the page that you are on. All that’s left to do then is copy the hook you need, and paste it in to your add_action and add_filter functions.”

WP-FirePHP

“This Plugin integrates FirePHP in your WordPress installation and simplifies developing. No more vardump() and echo while debugging. FirePHP take care of it, clean and easy.”

Loco Translate

“Loco Translate provides in-browser editing of WordPress translation files. It also provides localization tools for developers, such as extracting strings and generating templates.”

Theme Switcha

“Theme Switcha makes it easy for the site admin to preview and develop new themes without changing the default theme. So visitors will continue to use your site normally without ever knowing that you are testing new themes behind the scenes.”

Debug Objects

“Debug Objects provides a large number of information: query, cache, cron, constants, hooks, functions and many more.” E.g., query, cache, cron, constants, hooks, and functions. “Values and content get displayed at the frontend and backend of the blog, to analyze errors but also to better understand and develop with/for WordPress.”

Debug Bar Rewrite Rules

“Displays the current rewrite rules for the site. Requires the debug bar plugin.” Super useful information for when you need to see what’s happening under the hood with WordPress rewrite rules.

Developer

“This plugin will help you optimize your development environment by making sure that you have all the essential tools and plugins installed.”

5 Ways to Debug WordPress

“Many plugin and theme authors don’t take full advantage of some really helpful debugging tools in WordPress. Here’s a quick run-down of five cool tools for debugging.”

And here are some more useful plugins that haven’t been updated in awhile but continue to provide much-needed functionality. Old doesn’t mean broken ;)

WP Developer Assistant

WP Developer Assistant is “essentially is a toolkit that makes life as a WordPress developer easier.” Does cool stuff like customizable PHP errors, global variable dump, table modification, execute queries, phpinfo(), and much more.

Latency Tracker

“This really simple plugin hooks into your wp_footer function (so make sure that your theme uses it) to count the number of queries, how long they took, how much memory was use, and when it all occurred. That way, they can show some solid data to the host so that they are able to compare numbers and know for sure that their load times are faster or slower when compared.”

TPC! Memory Usage

“TPC! Memory Usage allows WordPress administrators to view the current and peak memory usage of the application. This is extremely helpful when testing new plugins, or if there are a lot of modifications, plugins, or large language files. As of version 0.4, administrators now have the ability to view detailed system information about their web server, MySQL, PHP, and WordPress software.”

WordPress Theme Generator

BONUS tool! I don’t know how useful it actually is, but the WordPress Theme Generator enables anyone to create custom WordPress themes “without any need for HTML, JS, PHP, or CSS knowledge.”

Leave a comment if you know other awesome resources for WordPress devs! :)