A newly installed plugin broke your WordPress blog? Unable to access your blog as well as your admin area, after activation of a particular plugin? Don’t worry, this is a common problem in WordPress and you can easily fix it. You will be able to access your admin area, after deactivating that problematic plugin(s). But, when your admin area is inaccessible, how come it is possible to deactivate a plugin? The answer is simple! You need to take help of phpMyAdmin to deactivate the plugin.
WordPress Tips
Why WordPress admin area freezes or become inaccessible after installation of some plugins? This problem mostly occur due to bad or conflicting code snippets. Either there are some bad codes in your newly installed plugin or an already active plugin conflicts with the new plugin. You can get rid of this problem by deactivating and removing problematic plugins.
First, let’s learn how to deactivate WordPress plugins via phpMyAdmin. It is very simple. You can do it even when you are not familiar with phpMyAdmin and MySQL database tables. But for your own safety first backup/export your existing database. Just follow the following steps and deactivate all your WordPress plugins to regain control over your WordPress installation:
- Login to your cPanel and open the phpMyAdmin interface.
- In phpMyAdmin, find your WordPress database and download a backup copy by using the ‘Export‘ function.
- Back to your database. Find the wp_options table and press ‘Browse‘ button under the ‘Action‘ column.
- Now, all rows under wp_options table will be listed. Find the row for active_plugins option. In my case it was table row no. 38.
- Press the ‘Edit‘ button for your active_plugins row. Now you will get an insert form with option_id, blog_id, option_name and option_value. Under option_value you will find something like this:
- Those lines represents your active WordPress plugins. Delete all of them and save your edit by pressing the ‘GO‘ button.
- That’s it. Now all your plugins are deactivated. Login to your WordPress admin area and activate the required pluings again. Just be careful not to activate your problematic plugin again. Also for stability and security reasons, it is advised that you remove all your old and unused plugins from your server.
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Plugins can be deactivated from phpmyadmin? I never thought about it. Indeed a helpful tip. Thanks for mentioning it on your blog.
whoa, i didn’t know it’s possible. thanks for the info. i’ll follow your instructions. god bless you!
Yes, it is possible. Deactivate all the plugins and after you upgrade, manually activate the required plugins.
Hi! I followed your instructions, but I still can’t access my plugins page. Should I upgrade first?
This is weird. I think some bad plugin(s) are causing the problem. You can try to upgrade. But if a malicious plugin is the reason, you may need to remove the plugin from your plugins folder. The the problem is, you may not know which is the culprit. So, better you backup your database and upgrade. If everything is okay, deactivate the plugins and activate them one by one (trying to find the problematic plugin).
Thanks for your response.
Unfortunately, I cant’ upgrade by blog through Fantastico either. It says “only manual upgrade is possible.” I don’t know what to do anymore.
Now I can see that you have installed wp 2.8.5. But still having some problem? Unable to upload image? This is weird. In my view, it also may be a problem caused by plugins. So, test by deactivating plugins one by one. Maybe your media related plugins are causing the problem.
Hi there! I just want you to know that everything’s working fine now. The WP-Grins plugin was the culprit! Have a blessed day!
I did this and it shut the entire thing down. Now I have this error message:
Warning: require_once(BP_PLUGIN_DIR/bp-themes/bp-default/_inc/ajax.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/pgnew/public_html/wp-content/themes/wp-clear-basic/bp/bp-functions.php on line 4
HELP!
From your directory structure I can say that you are using BuddyPress. It looks like a problem with your path. Check if you have bp-functions.php in correct directory. If not, correct the path. I hope it will work.
Thanks.