Drupal for Firebug: Under-the-hood Made Easy

Let's start here: Drupal for Firebug is amazing. I'll even go so far as to say that it's more useful than Devel Themer. More details below, but you should start by downloading the Drupal for Firebug Firefox extension (or the Chrome one) and drush dl drupalforfirebug on a local project and giving it a spin.

When I first saw Moshe demo the Devel Themer module at a Boston Drupal meetup a few years back it blew my mind. At that point I'd worked out some nifty tricks for inspecting Drupal's page generation innards, things like var_dump(array_slice(func_get_args(),1)) and tracing with xdebug. With Theme Developer I didn't need to add debug code to templates and modules (always a bit of a dangerous proposition), I could explore the template variables and tpl files through an entire page's content, without needing to know where to insert my debug statements ahead of time. And it looked really, really cool.

I still use Theme Developer at least once per project, but over time it's shortcomings have surfaced. For one, there are the issues with themes breaking when it's enabled and various JavaScript conflicts that can get a little hairy. But the biggest challenge is that it's just kind of heavy. It takes a while to enable, it adds some bloat to pages, and, when push comes to shove, it often is still just faster to add some debug code. It's an unfortunate fact that these pose significant obstacles to using TD as part of a developer's task-to-task workflow.

Enter Drupal for Firebug. What it does is pretty simple: it exposes information from your Drupal page load in a Firebug pane (or Chrome pop up). While it doesn't include some of the key information provided Devel Themer (namely template files used and suggestions), what it does include covers most of the elements I look for most often: user objects at load, view, update, etc., node objects, the SQL statement log and views rendered on the page. Add to this the ability to log you own object dumps and messages to DfF and it's a really powerful tool that comes pretty near eliminating the need for debug var_dumps while taking a lot of the smaller inspection needs off of Devel Themer's plate.

Except...for theme files. My #1 wish for this module is that the firep() logging function it provides would work in template files. The logic of this is tricky, and it makes sense that it doesn't (the Firebug data is exposed in $closure and therefor must be ready for the page template, which is called up top), but a workaround to this would make the module THE goto debugging solution for me. Secondly, if it could also list template files used it would pretty much have the field covered.

Anyone have any ideas how best to add thse features? Could DfF use some sort of AJAX magic to retrieve the data displayed after the full page render, perhaps?

What do you use to dig into Drupal?