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Black Bar

By Gemini Labs

Developer Tools & Customization / Debugging & Development Tools

Black Bar Review - In-Depth Analysis

Black Bar is a Debug Bar for WordPress developers that provides insights into errors, SQL queries, and performance metrics.

Performance Overview

WPS Score

6.43/10

User Rating

5/5 (based on 9+ reviews)

Active Installations

600+

Update Frequency

Below Average It is calculated using the weighted average of same category plugins.

Security Score

1 / 10 (Very Low Risk) It is calculated using the weighted average of all versions.

What It Does

Black Bar is an unobtrusive Debug Bar for WordPress developers. It collects and displays errors, executed SQL queries, slow actions and hooks, theme templates, global variables, and provides a profiler.

This tool helps you debug your code with the Console, inspect global variables like COOKIE, GET, POST, SERVER, SESSION, and WP_Screen. You can measure the performance of your code with the Profiler and view any PHP errors that occur when loading a page in the Console.

Additionally, it allows you to view executed MySQL queries along with execution time and backtrace, as well as the template files of the active theme in loaded order. You can also see the 50 slowest action and filter hooks along with callbacks ordered by priority.

Other Notable Features

Here are a few other notable features of this free Black Bar plugin.

Debug Bar

Debugging

Performance profiling

FAQ

To add entries to the console, insert the following line of PHP anywhere in your code:

apply_filters('console', 'Enter something to debug here');

You can also add an optional log level like this:

apply_filters('console', 'Enter something to debug here', 'error');

The available log levels are: debug, info, notice, warning, error, critical, alert, and emergency.

To use the profiler, insert the following lines of PHP before and after the code you are profiling:

Before:

apply_filters('trace:start', 'Enter a description of what you are profiling here');

After:

apply_filters('trace:stop');

By default, Black Bar is only visible to administrator users. To enable it for all logged-in users, use this code snippet:

add_filter('blackbar/enabled', 'is_user_logged_in');

By default, Black Bar displays the 50 slowest action/filter hooks. To display all hooks, use this code snippet:

add_filter('blackbar/hooks/all', '__return_true');

By default, Black Bar marks queries that run longer than 50ms with a warning color, and longer than 1000ms with an error color. To change these thresholds, use these hooks:

add_filter('blackbar/queries/ms_error', fn () => 1000); // 1s add_filter('blackbar/queries/ms_warning', fn () => 50); // 50ms

Contributors and developers

“Black Bar” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Gemini Labs

Paul

Free Version

WPS

6.43

Average

Ratings

5 out of 5 | 9

Version

4.2.0

Last updated

3 months ago

Active installations

600+

WordPress version

7.0 or higher

PHP version

8.1.2 or higher

Languages

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Black Bar Review - In-Depth Analysis

Performance Overview

What It Does

Other Notable Features

FAQ

Contributors and developers

Ratings

Reviews (9)

Sort by:

Contributors & Developers

Interested in development?

Changelog

Security Status

Secure

No Unpatched Vulnerabilities

Known Vulnerabilities (0)

Previous Versions

WPS

6.43

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