Writing and debugging Craft plugins I think my question is simple but may fall outside of the scope of this forum. What is best practices when writing and debugging Craft plugins? Obviously, one way to do so is to create a account on a server, write the code, upload and install it and then trigger the code using twig in a web page. Uggg...

Is there a good (hopefully free, open source) way to write and debug plug in code for Craft, perhaps locally?
I'm not really sure what this has to do with Craft because it's the same process with every single PHP file... You download xampp/wampp/lampp or whatever you want, install it, open it, activate your apache and MySQL, copy your project into your htdocs folder, create your database at localhost/phpmyadmin and start to create your plugin.

Anyway when you use a good IDE it makes absolutely no difference whether you create it locally or not since a good IDE will upload/download/compare your files on the server automatically. You don't have to upload all your files with programs like Filezilla or something like that