I published a post about the default plugins I use when creating a site with WordPress the other day. On this list is a plugin called “WP to Twitter”. Yesterday (22/05/2012) I was confronted with an update for this plugin. I checked out the change log, looked good and hit update. This is where it went wrong. If you’ve ever had the white screen of death while looking at your administration screens you heart sinks and you begin to think alot of things.
When was the last time I backup my site, is the front end of my website also down?
Yes, the above is quite severe thoughts but if I had been updating several plugins or even WordPress core itself then really I’d have a long day trying to work out what went wrong. Luckily enough it was only 1 plugin and it went wrong. Hunting across the internet I found literally thousands of sites telling me that I needed to go into the database and do this and do that. Not really wanting to do this I hunted some more and came across a simple solution to disable the misbehaving plugin.
- I logged into my hosts control panel
- Navigated to the file manager of my site
- I then went to the following directory /wp-content -> /Plugins.
- Finding the WP to Twitter folder i renamed it.
- Job done. When you login to your wp-admin area you’ll see WordPress has de-activated the plugin and the white screen has gone.
When I was drafting this post there was some chat about this happening over on the WP to Twitter plugin page and this morning another update has been released fixing the error.
Well done Joseph Dolson in producing a fix so quick.