Exercise – parse errors

Try the following exercise:

Yikes! Your site is now broken. Why did this happen? We introduced errors into the plugin's main file (hello.php), so including it caused PHP and WordPress to choke. If you did not see any errors and instead saw only a blank white page, you need to refer back to the previous chapter and the section on debugging to ensure that you have configured PHP to report errors. This is vital!

Delete the gibberish line from the hello.php file and save to return the plugin back to normal.

The parse error only occurs if there is an error in an active plugin. Deactivated plugins are not included by WordPress and therefore their code is not parsed. You can try the same exercise after deactivating the plugin and you'll notice that WordPress does not raise any errors.