I'm new to PHP and WordPress development. I have PhpStorm correctly setup and tested to run and debug simple PHP pages - sorted.
I want to development WordPress plugins, so have created a new WordPress plugin project in PhpStorm.
However, I cannot see how this works. The plugin is outside the WordPress install, and I believe it needs to be inside WordPress - in the plugins directory.
I have read all of the JetBrains instructions in fine detail for doing this MANY, MANY times, and nothing tells me how to make the plugin work within WordPress when it exists externally, so that it can be debugged.
I'm obviously missing some vital information or principal, as every article or YouTube video skips this. If I put some code in the plugin php file and set a debugger breakpoint in the hope that it 'magically' just works - nothing happens. Yet I can successfully hit a breakpoint set in the WordPress source files themselves - so something is definitely wrong.
Can someone tell me what I'm missing. I'm completely out of ideas, and massively frustrated.
Should I just abandon the standard PhpStorm project setup and just create a php file inside the WordPress plugins directory directly and just do things there. Seems a shame as I want to keep the plugin separate - as PhpStorm seems to recommend.