Title: Firebug or such development tool
Last modified: August 20, 2016

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# Firebug or such development tool

 *  [Jim Moran](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jim-moran/)
 * (@jim-moran)
 * [14 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/firebug-or-such-development-tool/)
 * I’m new to WordPress and managing website coding. I have what’s probably a “duh”
   question. I use Firebug or the Google tool to identify a piece of web content
   and its underlying CSS and HTML code. I can figure out the CSS as there is just
   one CSS stylesheet file to deal with. But how do I know which template file is
   being referred to in the HTML side of the screen? How do I know if the code is
   part of index.php, or header.php etc.?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

 *  [Sennza Pty Ltd](https://wordpress.org/support/users/sennza/)
 * (@sennza)
 * [14 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/firebug-or-such-development-tool/#post-2285549)
 * Hey Jim,
 * That’s definitely not a “duh” question at all! There are stacks of template files
   and it just takes a bit of time to work it out. Usually the header.php and footer.
   php are the easiest ones to track down but it’s the content in the middle that
   can be a be tricky for newcomers.
 * What I normally do is look at the CSS classes on the body tag as they normally
   give a bit of insight.
 * They’ll have classes like ‘page’, ‘single’, ‘page-template-showcase-php’, ‘archive’,‘
   404’ etc and they’ll give you a good idea of what file name you probably want
   to look for.
 * Hope that gives you a bit more help!
 *  [bollocks187](https://wordpress.org/support/users/bollocks187/)
 * (@bollocks187)
 * [14 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/firebug-or-such-development-tool/#post-2285709)
 * Okay that is good advice. But what “development tool kit” can you efficiently
   use to track and step through the code PHP scripts ?
 * Is there no IDE that wraps around WP code and traces, maps everything etc
 * Zend ?
 *  [Sennza Pty Ltd](https://wordpress.org/support/users/sennza/)
 * (@sennza)
 * [14 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/firebug-or-such-development-tool/#post-2285710)
 * Hey bollocks187,
 * You’ll be after [http://xdebug.org/](http://xdebug.org/) for that. It let’s you
   live trace php code. That combined with a code editor such as [PhpStorm](http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/)
   will do the trick.
 * There is a great video on the PhpStorm site showing how to do that. Check out
   the Remote Debugging with PhpStorm video on this [page](http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/documentation/index.html)
 * Good luck!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

The topic ‘Firebug or such development tool’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [css](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/css/)
 * [html](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/html/)

 * 3 replies
 * 3 participants
 * Last reply from: [Sennza Pty Ltd](https://wordpress.org/support/users/sennza/)
 * Last activity: [14 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/firebug-or-such-development-tool/#post-2285710)
 * Status: not resolved

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