Bill Ryan's Other Blog

I installed a Paypal Plugin last night before heading out to enjoy day 1 of 3, of a beautiful rainy night in Charleston.  Off I went, oblivious to the fact I just nuked my blog.  This morning when I went to track my visits and see what my favorite stalkers were looking at, no blog.  A few rounds of testing and I quickly realized it was down.  The site was still up and so was email, but the blog was down.  Digging into it, I realized it was a Plugin gone bad. I don’t know if it’s the plugin itself or something I did (I used the Autoinstall feature which I will never do again b/c it’s so freaking hard to undo things when you use this method) so I won’t mention which one it was.

With no admin panel to deactivate things, I had to get down and dirty (If I wasn’t a programmer, I really can’t imagine what I would have done other than beg someone to help me).  A few Bing searches, a few SQL Queries later, my site was back up although all of my plugins were now deactivated (a small price to pay overall). 

I would highly encourage you to take great care with plugins. I’ve installed over 20 and 5 have been done with the autoinstall feature, this was my first problem.  Once you install a plugin, hit your site immediately to make sure you didn’t break anything.  If you do nuke your install, read the following:

How to disable all WordPress Plugins directly from the database (You will need to know how to connect to your database and be comfortable writing basic SQL Queries – remember kids, this is MySql so don’t forget your semicolons.

For the less severe problems, this will help, particularly if you’re not all that technical.

A Plugin Broke your WordPress Blog?  Here’s what to do

[tags]Wordpress, Plugin, Plugin Broke WordPress, WordPress Plugins[/tags]

Ok, so I finally got the email issues worked out and figured I’d share the info with others who might be interested. By default, the installation had mail turned off. From what I read, SMTP/Sendmail needs to be running to get this to work and that may be a bit more than some more security conscious folks can stomach. I however, can.

In the wp-includes folder of your installation, you’ll need to edit:

• pluggable.php
• class-phpmailer.php

Find this line in pluggable.php $phpmailer->isMail();and modify it so it reads $phpmailer->isSMTP();

Next open up class-phpmailer.php and set the hostname and other credentials:

var $Host        = "YOUR_HOSTMANE";
var $SMTPAuth     = true;
var $Username     = "YOUR_USERNAME";
var $Password     = "PASSWORD";


Upload to your server’s wp-includes folder and all should be good.  That is, provided you have SendMail running and you have your credentials handy. For the record, I didn’t figure this out myself. Giving credit where credit is due, I got everything here and he deserves all the credit.  If you want to use a different approach, you can look through the zillions of WordPress SMTP Plugins.

[tags] Wordpress, SMTP, Sendmail [/tags]

After I asked about it, several readers told me they could register to comment but never recieved the activation/confirmation emails. From what I’ve seen, the problem is in one of WordPresses files and I just need to have it Copy you in the email. I haven’t done that yet but it’s on the TODO list for this evening. Even without it though – you should be able to comment if you register. If you have a problem though – let me know. I’m still stumbling and fumbling my way around WordPress (In so many ways I love it, in a few Community Server has it beat by lightyears) and I’ve seen others complain of the problem. The resolution is a really easy PHP file edit so hopefully I’ll be able to get it working this evening – I’ll update once it’s in place. If you are new, please do me a favor and register and try a test comment – “Test” will be fine – I just want to see if anyone is still having problems and what the difference is between those accounts that have had problems and those that haven’t.