Turning on PHP Debugging and Error Messages
Debugging messages are a powerful tool; however, many production systems (and test systems for that matter) have them disabled by default. If your PHP script is crashing horribly and you are not getting any runtime error messages, it is likely that this is the case for you.
You can initiate PHP debugging messages for the server by changing the display_errors and error_level settings in php.ini. Unfortunately, this is not the best situation in a production system.