Tag Archives: Plugins

A recently plugin which were auto-updated by WordPress didn’t execute properly. I have no idea why or what happened, the logs didn’t show anything special.

This error meant that: 1, My website were down with an error and 2, Even worse that my uptime checker script, failed to notice this. As it happened I were due to update some files and found the site were down, it had been down for anywhere between 3 and 4 hours.

Fixing The Problem

The problem is quite easy to fix, you need to disable the particular plugin or all plugins directly from your database. This is useful not only when WordPress plugin updates go wrong, but times when WordPress is loading blank pages or you’re unable to access the admin pages after a new version of WordPress is installed.

You can easily disable all WordPress plugins directly from your database. This is useful when you have some problems with your WordPress installation such as not being able to log in to the admin area and/or having blank pages.

You need to login to your WebHosting control panel, which is probably cPanel.

From here you need to select phpMyAdmin, which will probably redirect you. From here select the appropriate WordPress Database from the list on the left hand side.

Scroll down the list of tables until you find the one called “wp_options”. I suggest you click on the column names (option_name ^)and set them to Alphabetic. Look for “active_plugins” which should be on the first page..

In a clean install this will likely have 2 plugins enabled on this list, which are Akismet and Hello Dolly. This means the “wp_options”.”active_plugins” column will look like:

a:2:{i:0;s:19:”akismet/akismet.php”;i:1;s:9:”hello.php”;}

Option 1: Disable ALL Plugins

Simple click the little pencil icon or “Edit” (see above pic), or double click the line underneath “option_value” and delete all the text, and click save/done, so its now empty.

You should now be able to load wordpress without any problems.

Option 2: Selectively Disable Plugins

If you know which plugin is at fault, you can delete that 1 plugin. If you wanted to disable “hello dolly”, you would change it to:

a:2:{i:0;s:19:”akismet/akismet.php”;}

Each item looks like

i:0;s:19:”akismet/akismet.php”;

i:1;s:9:”hello.php”;

This means deleting everything between i: and ; which is the line for each plugin, ensure you delete the whole section. If you don’t correctly edit it, WordPress to clear the list and disable all plugins anyway.

You should now be able to login again to WordPress.

Option 3: MySQL Query

There is an easier option, and that’s to run a MySQL query like this…

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = '' WHERE option_name = 'active_plugins';

Once the above is completed, you should be able to login to WordPress.

Reactivate WordPress Plugins

Now you can login back in to WordPress, you will need to reactivate all your chosen plugins. I would recommend doing this 1 by 1 so you verify each one is functioning correctly. You should also take this opportunity to delete any unused plugins and update any out of date plugins.

In my case, it were simply updating the plugin, and re-activating it and all done.