Joomla 3.1 Error Reporting

Joomla includes the ability to use error reporting to help determine if there are problems occurring with your site. In this guide, we will explain what error reporting is in Joomla, go over the available options, test the settings, then show you how to change them.

• What is Error Reporting
• What Options Are Available for Error Reporting?
• Our Testing of the Error Reporting Setting
• To Change the Joomla 3.0 Error Reporting Setting

What is Error Reporting?

One of Joomla 3.0’s Server Settings is Error Reporting. Joomla gives the following description for this setting.

Error Reporting
Select the appropriate level of reporting from the drop down list. See the Help Screen for full details.

If you click the help button on the page, it unfortunately does not give any information yet at this time.

What Options Are Available for Error Reporting?

The following options are available for Error Reporting:

1. System Default
2. None
3. Simple
4. Maximum
5. Development

Our Testing of the Error Reporting Setting

To test the different options that are available for Error Reporting, we created a simple syntax error in the mod_login module by removing a ; from the PHP code. We then went through the various Error Reporting settings to see what type of error would be reported. Here are our findings:

System Default	Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_REQUIRE in /home/bradm/public_html/github2/modules/mod_login/mod_login.php on line 21
None
Simple	Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_REQUIRE in /home/bradm/public_html/github2/modules/mod_login/mod_login.php on line 21
Maximum	Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_REQUIRE in /home/bradm/public_html/github2/modules/mod_login/mod_login.php on line 21
Development	Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_REQUIRE in /home/bradm/public_html/github2/modules/mod_login/mod_login.php on line 21

As you can see in the table above, all settings showed the same error message, except the none setting. As the none setting implies, no error messages are shown on the screen.

To Change the Joomla 3.0 Error Reporting Setting

1. Log into your Joomla 3.0 Dashboard
2. Click Global Configuration in the left menu
3. In the tabbed menu, click the Server tab
4. Find the Error Reporting setting under the Server Settings heading. Change the value as needed, and then click the Save button in the top left of the page.