Yesterday, PG learned that he could have too much of a good thing.
PG loves various and sundry plugins, shortcuts, etc., and uses them liberally on TPV.
However, again, it is possible to have too much of a good thing.
At some time during the last couple of days, TPV decided it had too many plugins.
As you probably have already noticed if you use WordPress as a blogging platform, WordPress is updated on a regular basis. The last update PG noticed was on September 4 of this year. A WordPress update can break a plugin if the plugin’s author isn’t paying attention or has better things to do than update a plugin that’s being used by 13 people.
PG loves plugins and has a great many that he uses for his work on TPV.
However, like birthday cake, too many plugins can be too much of a good thing.
In PG’s case, he was locked out of TPV for several hours yesterday.
Thanks to the extremely helpful customer support staff at Hosting Matters, where TPV resides, PG learned that some of his plugins were out of date, which was likely the reason he couldn’t log on.
In addition to direct assistance, customer support told PG that his problems were probably being caused by obsolete plugins and, possibly, just too many plugins on TPV.
PG hadn’t thought about FTP (File Transfer Protocol) for many years, but that’s the way you get into a plugin directory when one of them is messing with the works on your website and you can’t get into the works through the front door.
Insider hint: There are a lot of opaque FTP apps available for no cost. At least some of them are worth what you pay for them or less.
Cute FTP has a dumb name and you have to pay for it, but it works. Right away. Without tweaking a bunch of stuff.
Using Cute FTP, PG looked at the WordPress plugin directory for TPV.
One of the quickest ways of locating a bad actor in the plugins directory is to disable the plugins, then see if the site works. Some people suggest disabling plugins one at a time to locate the bad actor.
PG has a different approach. He wanted TPV up ASAP, so he disabled all the plugins. You can remove the plugins, but the easier/faster way to find a nasty boy plugin is to rename them. In the FTP program, PG added “123” at the end of each plugin directory name so WordPress couldn’t find them.
TPV immediately came back to life, albeit looking a little strange because the effects of removing some of the plugins were visual at some locations.
Under the PG method, you remove the “123” at the end of each plugin directory and refresh TPV to see if it still works. (PG started with one directory at a time, but, for plugins that intuitively seemed to him like they were not likely to be bad actors, he sometimes removed the numbers on more than one directory).
So, when PG had reactivated all the plugins he thought were necessary for a hale and hardy TPV (he wasn’t sure exactly what some of them did and why he installed them in the first place), he left the remainder with their 123 extensions in place in case something weird happened on a periodic basis that the plugin prevented, in which case, he’ll go back to the plugin directory.
As the Hosting Matters support person reminded PG, even though all plugins can be behaving properly, a WordPress update can break a plugin and/or an update to the plugin can cause problems for the website.
PG thinks TPV is working fine, but (as the Hosting Matters person reminded him) it’s a very large site, with lots of stuff in various locations, so, if any of the visitors to TPV see anything that looks weird (ok, weirder than usual), let PG know through the Contact link and he’ll go digging around the works.
One last item – if anyone has suggestions for a good website archiving plugin or program, PG would appreciate it if you left a comment.
One hint. If you are comfortable on a Unix or Linux command-line and your ISP will allow it, log into your site with putty or the equivalent. (If they allow straight telnet, switch ISPs.) It makes fiddling with your WordPress installation easier. FTP (File Transfer Protocol) was not designed to be a troubleshooting environment, although it is wonderful for what it is.
I would recommend Updraft as a back up plug in, at least to start. I have been able to restore a full site from a backup using that tool.
While I don’t disagree that a messed up plugin can cause a problem of the sort you mention, in my experience, a problem is far more likely to be caused by a recently updated one than one that is obsolete.
For me, it is often a security plugin messing with the config file…I was using one of the super popular ones, and suddenly it added 100s of lines of code to my config file AND created a loop that was making the load on my site so high that the ISP was threatening to close me down. My first ISP couldn’t figure out what the cause was, and kept telling me I must be getting spammed or attacked. Seemed odd. I eventually gave up on them, switched to another ISP, and a few months later, it happened again. The tech there immediately told me it was my config file, opened it, saw what my security file had done, and showed me it had basically replicated itself when it saved so it was trying to do a whole bunch of steps repeatedly. So everytime I loaded a page, it would run 100s of extra commands, killing the server. Why? Because my security program futzed itself.
By contrast, I have a few obsolete plugins that aren’t updated but work fine because they’re generic. Never any problems with them. When I do have a problem, I reset and disable all plugins, and then load them in batches of 5, starting with the ones that I use the most. Invariably I find plugin #25-30 was the cause, and look, recently updated badly and now conflicts with another plugin. Nine times out of ten it is conflicting with my security plugin, often because it the new plugin has some atypical way or place for its file saving and my security plugin won’t let it do what a bad coder told it to do. Not malicious, just bad coding, or often, a shortcut from doing it the right way.
As a result, though, I keep my plugins down to bare minimum, which for me is about 30-40 at any given time, although some are installed but disabled — I enable them only when I need to do some specific task.
Good luck…
Paul
I forgot to ask…what kind of “archiving” option are you looking for? One that archives posts and moves them off the server? One that renames posts so they aren’t “active” but are still on the server? Or more of a website archive i.e. full backup to make a copy?
Paul
I recommend FileZilla as a long time stalwart tool for FTP.
I tried FileZilla, Karen, but you must be smarter than I am because I couldn’t get it to log in to my site.
Cute PDF worked on my first try.
PG maintains an amazing site, full of fascinating and essential information.
Thank you. Sorry plugins give you headaches.
You’re welcome, Alicia.
My plugins have been well-behaved for long enough that the computer gods noticed that I needed more humility.
Another thing to be mindful of is that two perfectly fine individual plug-ins might conflict with each other or combine to mess up something else.
On some platforms, the order in which the plug-ins install might also make a difference.
“Computers are a miracle; its a miracle they work at all.”
Good points, Felix. I also learned that a perfectly happy set of plugins can get messed up when one of them is updated.