Wordpress-MD News

Note: All of the following discussion pertains to a Wordpress site running on release 2.8.4 and PhpMyAdmin access.

The broad, almost unlimited functionality of Wordpress is accomplished through installing plug-ins. From the simple to the complex, there are plug-ins for nearly anything you want to add to your Wordpress site, and they couldn’t be easier to install with the new features of the latest release of Wordpress 2.8.4.

Most of the time you’ll sail right through installing and using your plug-ins, but sometimes a plugin can create complete havoc. When that happens, the symptoms vary from warnings appearing, to your site disappearing (seemingly). If your site is simple, you probably don’t have or need a lot of plugins, but as you increase the number of plugins the chances of something going wrong increases because some plug-ins conflict with one another. Also, not following a plugin’s installation instructions can cause problems as some plugin require you to edit your template files. Let’s start with talking about plugin installation problems

1. The plugin won’t install and there is no warning.

1. Check that the plugin you are installing is updated to work with, or up to WP version 2.8.4.
2. Old, outdated and unsupported plugins should be avoided
3. Sometimes they’ll work with no problems. Try them at your own risk.
4. It’s a good practice to stick with plugins listed in the Wordpress plugin repository.

2. Plugin installation fails returning a memory error like this:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2357261 bytes) in /home/xxx/public_html/wp-includes/http.php

memory limit

1. Don’t worry, the fix is simple. In the root of your Wordpress installation is a file called wp-settings.php.
2. Open the file in your favorite text editor.
3. Go to line 13. It looks like this (click thumbnail above): define(’WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’,'32M);
4. Change the 32 to 64.
5. Save your changes and try installing the plugin again.

3. You have installed several plugins in a short time and suddenly your site breaks.

As with any trouble-shooting, let’s start with the simple approach first.

1. De-activate all of your plugins
2. Re-activate them one at a time, each time clearing your cache and reloading and viewing your site to see that it is working.
3. When you activate a plugin and your problem(s) return, that’s most likely the source of your problem(s). Deactivate that plugin and delete it.

And now the more complicated fix. Proceed at your own risk and only do this if you remember the last plug-in which you installed before a problem arose.

1. Deactivate all your plugins.
2. Login to your c-panel (hosting site control-panel) and go to PhpMyAdmin.
3. Navigate to the database for your site.
4. Select wp-options on the left-hand side.
5. Put a check-mark next to “option-values”.
6. Hit “browse” at the top menu.
7. Look for “active-plugins”.
8. Hit the edit (little pencil)
9. Looking at the large white box, it should be empty since you deactivated all your plugins. If it isn’t, delete whatever may be there.
10. Hit “GO” to save your changes.

4. Your plugins are active, you have uninstalled a plugin, but it’s still causing problems.

1. Follow all the steps above except no.1 above and then…
2. Below is an example (click thumbnail) of what you may see.
3. In this example we will assume that akismet is our problem plugin you would delete the italicized portion.
4. a:14:{i:0;s:53:”admin-management-xtended/admin-management-xtended.php“; i:1;s:19:”akismet/akismet.php”;i:2;s:43:”all-in-one-seo-pack/all_in_one_seo_pack.php”;i:3;s:24:”headspace2/headspace.php”;i:4;s:27:”redirection/redirection.php”;
5. Pay special attention that you will edit out only the bolded-red portion of the line which starts with a letter and ends with a colon.
6. Hit “Go” to save your changes.

phpmyadmin

There are probably other scenarios where what I have mentioned will not work. In that event search the Wordpress Support Forum. Also, it bears repeating a dozen times, but I’ll just mention it once – Back-up your site daily! It’s easy to do with the plug-in WP-DBManager.

If you have other plugin solutions or problems to share, please leave a comment and we’ll discuss it.

Paul