On the PHPClasses.org blog today Manuel Lemos has shared some advice on tracking and fixing bugs and some strategies to help prevent them in the future.

No matter how hard you try to test your PHP applications before putting them in production, you will always ship code to your server that has bugs. Some of those bugs will be very serious and need to be fixed before they cause greater damages to your application data that may be too hard to recover. Read this article to learn about a several good practices that you can apply to track bugs in production code, so you can fix them before it is too late.

Suggestions included in his list are things like:

• Test as Much as Possible Before in your Development Environment
• Separate your Code from Environment Configuration files
• Track PHP Errors with Assertion Condition Tests
• Send PHP Errors to an Error Log File
• Monitor the PHP Error Log File to Quickly Fix Serious Bugs
• Fix Your Bugs but Never Edit Code on the Production Server

He also includes a brief look at some things to think about when considering "defensive coding practices" and links to other articles with more information.