Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

I ran into this problem head on yesterday and didn’t have time to fix it. The only thing that was good was that it didn’t affect the front end of the website so I could leave it without any impact – except to me. It’s was very disconcerting not to be able to access my admin page. Something was definitely wrong with a plugin after thinking about it for a couple of seconds. It started after updating a plugin and I was also able to access the admin page from my Blackberry. I have a plugin installed that gives me a simple admin page from mobile devices.

I wasn’t able to disable all my plugins from this mobile version of the admin page – which would have been great! I then had to look for a solution to my issue by making the change at the SQL level.

There are two ways of approaching this. One is to run a query and then backup the list of plugins so that you can re-enable the lot from the SQL database and the other is to delete them outright. I preferred the first option just in case it caused MORE issues when I actually deleted them. I like to be safe :) Keep in mind that this just marks the plugins inactive. It does not delete the files from your folder structure.

If you need to attempt this to save your blog please take the time to backup your SQL DB before messing around.

1. After the backup login to your SQL DB (most host providers offer myPHPadmin as an admin console).
2. Once you are in, select your WordPress database from the drop down menu on the left side.
3. Click on the SQL tab which will bring up a window for SQL queries
4. Copy the following line into the box and press GO (if you changed the default prefix for your DB from wp_ to something else, please edit that from the line below)
   SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’;
5. Once active_plugins appears, press the edit button as shown below
   
6. You should see a value that looks something like this but much longer
   a:31:{i:0;s:13:”AddMySite.php”;i:1;s:19:”akismet/akismet.php”;i:2;s:23:”all_
7. Copy and paste that text into a notepad file and save it as a backup
8. Now delete all the text from the box and save the record
9. All of your plugins are now disabled

The alternate that I was talking about above does not afford you the option to copy that text out before deleting them.

1. After the backup login to your SQL DB (most host providers offer myPHPadmin as an admin console).
2. Once you are in, select your WordPress database from the drop down menu on the left side.
3. Click on the SQL tab which will bring up a window for SQL queries
4. Copy the following line into the box and press GO (if you changed the default prefix for your DB from wp_ to something else, please edit that from the line below)
   UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = ” WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’;

Now that you have used one of the two methods, you can go to your plugins page and enable them one by one to see which one was the culprit.

Happy blogging, it should be hard should it?

Geek on!

NEW YORK – When Jerald Spangenberg collapsed and died in the middle of a quest in an online game, his daughter embarked on a quest of her own: to let her father’s gaming friends know that he hadn’t just decided to desert them.

via Death leaves online lives in limbo; leaving instructions helps survivors – Archive – Family & Relationships Article – Yahoo! Canada Lifestyle.