During the process of developing extensions to Joomla, it can be frustrating to have to wade through a sea of code when you're tweaking the HTML output. Templates can get in the way when all you want to see is your own output before testing integration with templates.format=raw
The first trick is to add to the end of your URL the variable format=raw to the end of your URL, for example: http://www.your-domain.com/index.php?format=raw will show only the page component, with no HTML header or body tags. Note that if there are other variables already in the URL, use the ampersand (&) rather than the question mark (?).
tmpl=component
This second trick uses the template, but only loads the component position by using tmpl=component. This strips out all modules, such as menus, login boxes, and search boxes. This is useful when testing your HTML formatting for unclosed tags and other HTML errors, by ensuring that you are testing only your own code alongside the template. There's nothing more frustrating when tracking down bugs to spend extra time tracking down errors that turn out to be from someone else's badly coded module.
