I once laughed when a friend used WordPress 2.7′s auto plugin installer and temporarily hosed his blog. He had uploaded a zipped file that wasn’t a plugin at all. All he had to do was remember his shared hosting login and delete the plugin from the directory. But it made for some comical “OMG, what did I just do” moments.
Today I had a similar panic moment. Half asleep, I uploaded a zipped file called jeromes-query-diagnostics.zip and clicked “install” using the plugin installer. The plugin failed, but to my horror my blog now displayed a hundred lines of some weird text and had a php error up top. The text appeared in both the admin panel and on the blog itself. Since the plugin had automatically deactivated itself, I could skip that step. Here were the additional steps I took in my panicked state.
- First I deleted the plugin from my plugin folder. Unfortunately, I still saw lines and lines of text in both my admin panel and on my blog itself.
- I unzipped the plugin and read the files in a text editor, nothing there that looked like it changed anything.
- I read the error message and it pointed to another plugin. So I deactivated all plugins. Still no luck, but the error message changed.
- Now the error message pointed to my wp-pluggable file. I opened that file in a code editor and checked the line causing the error. Comparing it to a backup, it hadn’t changed.
- Next I uploaded a backup copy of every file in my wp-includes directory. No luck.
- I checked my theme templates for any sign of change in the header, functions, or main templates. No changes compared to backup copies.
- I tried Googling the plugin itself to see if anyone had reported a similar error, nope.
- Now I googled some of the text and found it belonged to the gnu public license. I tried renaming the license.txt file in my main directory, no success.
- Searching all my directories for license.txt, I found another in my plugin directory. Duh! Deleting that fixed the problem.
Turns out WordPress thinks anything in the wp-content/plugins directory is a plugin and executes it. The plugin had dumped a text file into the directory without creating it’s own folder. Lesson learned. Check all zipped files locally before using the auto-installer. Don’t play with your settings when tired. Finally, don’t take your anger out on your kids, even if they are banging the tv in the room with the wii controller while you are trying to fix your blog. Now I feel bad for yelling at my kids to get the hell out of the room. With any luck they will grow up hating blogs.
I can just picture this angry turnip yelling at his mini-turnip kids banging away at their turnip shaped TV with their (regular) wii controllers. heh. I got a laugh.
I keep having to learn this lesson, “Don’t play with your settings when tired.”, over and over again. *sigh*
I’ve read your blog for some time and love the info here..and so glad to know that it’s not just a novice thing from time to time. Even pro’s have those..wth did I do moments.
I had an actual plug in go bad and fought with it last friday – it for some reason effected the entire linking structure of the blog, no matter what you clicked on.. there was nothing there.
I had to re-install wordpress completely – and thank god for backups!
You have all the luck! If it happened to me I would have quietly shot myself……
Poor little turnips!
I had my good share of plugins nightmares when I updated my WordPress from 2.6.3 to 2.7 O_O
Ewww I hate when things like that happen. Its not a good feeling when everything gets messed up. But you’re lucky to know how to fix things!
A scary story but these things do happen. They are a pain, but at least next time you will be able to fix the problem a lot quicker.
Nasty – something I dread happening.
Was this because the actual plugin files were in a sub folder in the zipped file?
Sublimely: No, the plugin was not in a folder, just a single php file. But they thought they were clever throwing in a file called license.txt. That’s what killed my blog. Plugin designers should always create a folder, even if its a single file plugin.
AH! I knew there was a reason I was still FTPing updates even though 2.7 makes it SOOOO easy to skip.
At least this is the “first” horror story I’ve seen regarding 2.7!
I knew about files in the plugin directory being treated as a plugin. I had two plugins in the past that were just a file without a directory, and placing them in the root of the plugin directory worked just fine.
I know all too well about making changes when tired. I recently did that when I updated the OIO publisher, and the format of my blog became screwed up. I quickly restored the previous version (which fixed the problem) and went to bed.
I eventually upgraded, and realized it was just a cached CSS file that caused the layout issue.
BTW, I have yelled at my kids when something on my computer screws up. I just keep telling myself that my kids probably won’t remember each time I scream at them.
Having Been an Electronic Technician, I have long felt that Computers are at least double edged swords and can cut very deep at a moments notice.
Technology – you got to love it – Not.
Beamer
Ahhh — my kids are grown and gone, so I just get to yell at the dogs. Although I have birds, too it’s no good yelling at them, they just yell back and with my own words at that
Glad you got it sorted out and equally glad it was you and not me
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I have had a few mishaps when I get too tired and should have left things alone. I am must better at it these days and even make backups before I begin.
I still do my updates by the old standard “FTP” and not sure what to think about automatic updates for plugins yet.
When this happens it is a major pain and hopefully we learn our lesson and don’t do it again.
I did that once but luckily it was a theme file (zipped) so nothing actually happened. I simply deleted the folder and nothing bad happening ^^
I haven’t experienced this problem, but this has made to think about backing up my blog after every post.
What auto installer did you use ??
Hi
Be careful with this twitter plugin unless you like a white screen for your blog. I found when things like that happen I stay calm and think
this took more then just deactivating in fact it wouldn’t let me do nothing.I keep a copy of my whole blog off site I just beamed a few files and thank God I was back up
Stumbled
john: I’m glad you found a way to solve your issue. It sure is frustrating when you don’t know how to fix things.