Debugging WPML

Enabling the built-in debugging feature in WordPress

WordPress includes a debug mode which helps reveal PHP problems.

To enable it, open your wp-config.php file and look for define(‘WP_DEBUG’, false);. Change it to:

define('WP_DEBUG', true);

The wp-config.php is located in your WordPress root directory. It’s the same file where the database configuration settings are. You will have to access it by FTP or SFTP in order to edit it.

If you open wp-config.php and that define statement is not there, you can add it right before this line:

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

This will dump onto the screen any message, including errors, warnings and notices.

Please note that you’ll see everything, not only related to WPML. This will most likely include messages from other plugins, your theme and sometimes even WordPress core. The messages appear all over the place. Sometimes they appear right on top, but they can also appear in the middle of the page.

Enabling PHP error logging

In some cases, enabling WP_DEBUG will not display any error, but things still fail. This is especially true when you try to activate a plugin and it fails with an obscure Fatal error message. During plugin-activation, WordPress catches errors. When it can, it displays their content, but usually, it just prints a generic error message.

You can still get the complete information of what’s wrong, by dumping the PHP error log to a file.

To do this, add the following two lines to your wp-config.php file:

ini_set('log_errors',TRUE);
ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL);
ini_set('error_log', dirname(__FILE__) . '/error_log.txt');

You will need to create a file named error_log.txt in your WordPress root directory and give the web server full write access to it. You can do it with a command shell or using an FTP program.

How to send us bug reports

Our technical support forum is the best place for sending bug reports. WPML developers are monitoring every post and respond quickly. You can subscribe to get email notifications about comments in your thread to get our replies when they’re available.