How to switch on Joomla debugging... resolving problems

As I mentioned in my previous post I managed to get to a situation where every time I loaded the home page it loaded a 404 error. Now trying to search the web for a solution for a Joomla 404 error, as you can imagine results in a couple of pages!!

So I spotted by chance the debug option in Site->Global Configuration->System



Now if you switch the debug system on and apply changes you will notice all further interaction with Joomla will result in a load of debug information being displayed. All well and good! So now this information is showing I reloaded my home page and the resulting 404 error includes some debug information - hurrah!



So finally, armed with this new information I could see prior to the JError->raiseError() call, a call to JComponentHelper->renderComponent() which I then Googled to find precisely why my page wasn't loading!! I'm well aware the error was a really silly mistake (a missing default menu) but had I not found this option I could have been looking around for a solution for quite a while.