Beware of Certain Plugins
Yesterday I’ve experienced first hand on the effect an unsuitable Plugin can have on the operation of a WordPress blog. I was happily designing and setting up a new blog for a client friend of mine when suddenly I could hardly open up the site in a new browser.
What’s going on?
Even the admin side of WordPress was suddenly playing up going all strange on me. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what was wrong, especially since it all worked just fine minutes earlier. After unsuccessfully clicking around looking at code I changed, etc. I couldn’t deal with it any longer and got onto live hosting support.
At that stage I truly believed that it was due to them for some reasons and figured that they might surely be able to help me.
10 minutes later I was still no further and after conversing with the guy from tech support for all that time via instant text he simply told me to send an email to support.
Building frustration!
….well hello baby!
Don’t you just hate it when this happens?
I wasn’t a happy camper to tell you the truth. Funny enough as soon as I closed down the live widget I had my inspiration that I should have had before.
Suddenly I realized that it could have been the last Plugin I uploaded and since I tried pretty much everything else by then I deleted it from the server.
Guess what…
Yep, it was all due to this silly little part of code that had for mysterious reasons messed up the whole functionality of the blog.
The moral of the story
Is simple really, be smarter than me and always double check your blogs working status after each Plugin you upload and change of code you implement. Normally I do this automatically but for once I got slack trying to take the fast way – only did it turn out the rather long and frustrating way instead.
12 Responses to “Beware of Certain Plugins”
That happened to me, some crap plugins triggered the command which ate up all the available memory and hung up the server side’s resources.
Some are really bad plugins. I think we must have , DON”T USE WORDPRESS PLUGINS LIST SOON..
That’s another reason I have a ‘test blog’. Whenever I want to implement something new that I am not really sure of, I will test it on this blog. It’s fun too.
So I am curious … what plugin was giving you the problems?
test blog?? as if in blogger.. so, where do you host test blog?? on your private paid server or somewhere on free server..
help us.
tooo
@ Navin: yeah, it really sucks when this happens. I wish I knew why they do these things and your idea of a bad plugin list sounds like fun.
Kay: a test blog is a great idea. On my old laptop I was using XAMP Lite as an offline version, but since I have my new laptop and windows Vista I’ve had nothing but problems with it. It just wouldn’t work for me, so yesterday I finally downloaded WAMP Server and this seems to work fine.
@ Ben: it was a form creation Plugin (wp opt in) that I got from this site http://wp-plugins.net/
I use a domain hosting. What I do is just create another ’sub domain’ and create a new blog in it. Change fonts, background, css all are done there before I do it on my main site.
As for free blog sites, I’m sure you can simply create one for your test purposes. No harm in that I guess.
Monika,
You hit the nail on the head. I had the same plug in problems with 2 of my sites about a month ago and kept my Hosts’ tech support on the phone for almost 2 hours till
we figured it out.
Bad plug in list is a great idea, who’s gonna start?
Best Regards,
Abi
@ Abi: isn’t it funny, I reckon there are a lot more bloggers like us who have the same problem with (evil)Plugins.
Now for that list….mmmhh…were do we start?
Monika,
I guess I’ll start with one that slowed my sites
down from 1.5 second to 46 second searches and that
was wp-short stats. I didn’t have time to research why since I spent a few hours to find out that it was the culprit so I just got rid of it.
Next one is yours.
Best,
Abi
Hey Abi,
I mentioned mine further above in a reply to Ben. It is called wp-opt-in from http://wp-plugins.net/. It not only slowed my site down to hardly functioning, but it also stopped me from login in at times.
There is a list of working / non-working plugins on the Wordpress site at http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Plugin_Compatibility/2.3
It may not include every one, but it’s a starting place.
@ karl: thank you for posting this. I think it will help a lot of bloggers avoid aggravation.