Vinu Thomas has proposed a replacement for the usual var_dump or print_r sort of debugging developers tend to do - Krumo.

To put it simply, Krumo is a replacement for print_r() and var_dump(). By definition Krumo is a debugging tool (now for PHP5 only), which displays structured information about any PHP variable [...] it does the same job, but it presents the information beautified using CSS and DHTML.

It also supports output of other data in a "pretty format" like backtraces, included files and a listing of all constants. You can check out a demo of it in action here.

On the SitePoint blog today, Harry Fuecks shares some code he's worked up to create a "pretty exception" method for the Zend Framework.

Been playing around with Zend's framework some more and finally got annoyed enough about how exceptions are displayed to do something about it.

The code at the bottom of this post just needs including somewhere and enables a "pretty" exception handler-it's not specific to Zend's framework.

The idea is not original-it's PHP port from webpy which used code from Django - imitation and flattery.

The post includes several images of the output, showing the standard screen and examples of an various options expanded in different situations. The code is provided for you to simply cut and paste into your editor of choice.