It's often useful to have these discussions publicly so that others can see in the future who might have the same problem 🙂

To output the JSON object into a template, the first thing I did was convert the object to an Array and then navigate this Array instead.

PHP has a var_dump command which outputs the array into the browser - I'd recommend keeping your code away from the HTML template for now. Perhaps using document.write() or alert() as a starting point. If you can get a piece of data output like this, then it should make embedding it into a template easier.