Magento Environment for Development

Turn Error Reporting ON

By default, magento will not show any errors. But while development often programmers need to know what's going wrong. To turn on the error reporting, do the following:

Open magento/index.php

Uncomment ini_set('display_errors', 1) so that it looks like this:

ini_set('display_errors', 1);

Then find this code

if (isset($_SERVER['MAGE_IS_DEVELOPER_MODE'])) {
Mage::setIsDeveloperMode(true);
}

and change it to

//if (isset($_SERVER['MAGE_IS_DEVELOPER_MODE'])) {
Mage::setIsDeveloperMode(true);
//}

Turn off Caching

Its very frustrating when your changes in the code doesn't shows up and all blame goes to caching.

To turn of caching,

Log in to admin section:

Hover on System->Cache Management

Click "Select All", choose action disable and click submit