If you are a serious PHP developer and have not given debugging a fair chance, or a chance at all, you are killing yourself. So let's do this thing from the ground up. WAMP, XDebug, IntelliJ, and magic. Follow these steps (for Windows) to reach my recent state of elightenment and PHP debugging bliss.

It's a sixteen step process, but don't let that scare you off - it's made up of lots of little steps like "make a phpinfo() page" and "download IntelliJ IDEA". The rest is actually setting up a new PHP project, dropping in a breakpoint and mapping the scripts to run on your local machine's WAMP install.