I’m in the process of writing a plugin and I’m trying to gauge when to use different approaches of handling errors.

There are three methods I’m considering:

• Throwing an Exception (custom class)
• Returning an Error Object (extension of WP_Error)
• Just return null/false

Some situations that I’m considering

• Trying to get/set an option stored in the Registry that doesn’t exist
• Passing an invalid value to a method (which should be rare)
• Calling a method that the class’ overloader cannot resolve to

Suggestions? Since writing a WordPress plugin has some special considerations, I’m not sure whether it would be worth asking this on a general PHP board.