The Symfony blog points out a handy feature included with the latest release of the framework - a web debugging toolbar that gives you a quick summary of the stats for the current page.

The symfony web debug toolbar is one of the developer best friend. It is always conveniently accessible in the browser when using the development environment. It gives you everything you need to know about the current page and ease the debugging of your applications. Until now, all the information available in this toolbar were hardcoded. But as of symfony 1.2, the web debug toolbar is entirely configurable.

The toolbar contains information like: the version of the framework you're using, cache information, logging, memory usage and the execution time of the page. They also include a bit on how to customize your toolbar, adding and removing panels from the bar as well as changing up the look with styles.

The Zend Developer Zone has a bonus episode of their PHP Abstract podcast series posted, a different sort of episode - it's a video podcast as hosted by Davey Shafik and covering the combination of Ajax and PHP (and debugging all along the way).

Davey is a full time PHP Developer with 10 years experience in PHP and related technologies. An avid author for both magazines and books author, Davey keeps his mind sharp by trying to tackle problems from a unique perspective. Today Davey is going to show us how to debug Ajax applications using Firebug and the Zend Developer toolbar.

You can grab the video [mov] directly from the ZDZ site or subscribe to their feed to get this and other great podcasts.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest edition of their podcast - PHP Abstract. In this episode Yossi Leno looks at using the Zend Toolbars to work in your applications.

Our special guest for this episode of the PHP Abstract podcast is Yossi is the product manager for the development tools group at Zend. He is going to talk to us today about using the Zend Browser Toolbars for Debugging and Profiling your applications.

There's two ways to get the new show - download it directly or subscribe to their feed and get the latest ones hand delivered. They've also started a new program to help bring in more community input into the podcast (oh, and they pay too - $75) for making your contribution.

Jim Plush got impatient for Zend to update their Zend Studio Plugin for Mozilla and Firefox, so he did it himself.

Again, I can't wait any longer for people to update firefox2 extensions. Here is a download link for the Zend Toolbar Extension for Firefox 2: http://www.litfuel.net/plush/files/ZendFirefoxToolbar-1.5.1.xpi.

The Zend Studio Plugin for Mozilla/Firefox allows developers to debug and profile PHP applications (running on the Zend Platform) through the web. Check out Zend's page for more information.

What do you get when you combine a method for remote debugging Zend Server from the CLI and some creative javascript handling? This updated tool from Davey Shafik, a toolbar item for Firefox to link directly to the debugger on the Zend Server.

Simply drag this link to your Personal Toolbar: Debug in ZDE

Then, edit its link (Right click > Properties) and change the debug_host to your own IP (this link has it set for localhost). Your IP must be in the zend_debugger.allow_hosts php.ini setting for this to work.

The end result is that you can directly debug the page you're viewing without having to fool with going the long way around with the debugger.