In Part one of the "Error reporting in PHP" series from LinuxWorld.com.au, they give a (very) brief overview of what error erporting is, how to configure it, and how to make your own, more useful errors.

By default, PHP generates a lot of helpful information for developers when an error occurs in the execution of a script. This information is much less useful to users, however. In fact, telling users the line number of the error, the function it occurred in, the location of the script on the file system and the exact nature of the error would be considered to compromise the security of the script itself.

More importantly, it is the developer of the script who needs to be notified of the exact nature of the error, not the user. If only the user receives this error report, the developer will not know of the bug in their script.

There are tons of ways to enable and set up your error reporting, and this article is simply one way to go about it. It makes the simple part of error handling setup easier to accomplish, but the more detailed information is saved for future articles in the series...