I built something like that for the core, which would allow for your plugin to hook into it and extend it further by sending errors through syslog or anything else for that matter.

However the patch is imperfect and I will have time to show it some love in a couple of weeks. It would be nice if you could find that ticket and give some input on its implementation. The more feedback, the better the next patch will be.

Yes, extending the class would open up a nice realm of possibilities, but I wanted to keep the example simple.

I’m glad you liked the example, and I too would like to see error handling become the norm rather than the exception (no pun intended).

@Dhruva,

Thanks a lot. I hope this helps you out with error handling.

I had created simple widgets that would simply display a predefined html code, which I could also edit in the widget edit mode. It was probably one of the most basic and simplest of widget code that could be!

But somehow for quite some time I struggled with the code since in the widgets.php page my widgets in particular were somehow creating problems. While the widgets.php page lists the widgets in a loop and it reaches my widget, it was getting truncated over there! The widgets.php would simply stop further loading and the page truncates early with a broken widgets page.

It took me quite sometime and patience of trail and error methods to find out how to correct the problem, although I still do not understand really what was causing the truncation.

This post is really helpful, I think it will help people like me who are relatively new in this area, and also it will help advanced developers to build better code! Error handling is one of the most critical parts which are often ignored by developers because they tend to feel that the errors are happening as a result of things outside of the control of their program. But it’s importance is even more in such situations. :).
Thanks for the post.

Except the day when the noobs create everything as an exception to pass data, then I could just die.

You could just extend the WP_Error class and like, I don’t know, return a different message for get_error method. It would be half the code.


class my_class_example_error extends WP_Error {
function get_error($code='') {
return __('This is an example error.');
}
}