I know it sounds weird, but I came across a situation in which I needed to see a component's output and nothing else. That allowed me to better debug the HTML that was coming from the component.

Special thanks to Dean Marshall for showing me this nifty little trick.

It's pretty simple, just follow these steps:

• Create a menu item that links to your component.
• Once you have created your menu item, click on that menu item in your Menu Manager like you were going to edit the menu item.
• Next to "URL", you should see something like "index.php?option=com_yourcomponent&...". Copy that URL.
• In the browser address bar, type the domain name and path to your website along with the URL information you copied in the previous step.
• Change "index.php" to "index2.php", and voila! You are now looking at just your component's output.