The Day the Plugins Disappeared…

Recently I logged back into one of the first web sites I ever built in WordPress and saw something very strange. Even though I was logged in as an  Administrator, the Plugins and Tools menu items were missing from the Dashboard. “So, this is strange,” I think to myself, and I immediately start fiddling around with what might have caused this interesting little explosion in my beloved WordPress.

Hunting Wabbits…

I usually put some code in the functions.php to hide menu items so clients don’t get into things that could break the site. Among these are the Plugins and Tools menus. “Ah hah,” I think to myself, “the code is acting up and blocking the menus from me as an administrator for some reason.” So I check the functions.php, but no such code is present. This was my first WordPress site after all. The only thing I knew about functions back then was the old School House Rock song… (you’re singing it in your head now aren’t you – you’re welcome).

So then I Skyped a friend with mad WP skills and asked her if she’d ever seen such a weird problem. Of course, she hadn’t. I can break WordPress is the most creative ways. She thought the simplest thing to do would be to just reinstall WordPress. So, I did, using the happy little button in the Dashboard.

Then I noticed something even stranger…

Out of the corner of my eye, during the reinstall, I see the Plugins menu item appear ever so briefly and then disappear. I shook my head and blinked my eyes and tried it again. Sure enough, during the reinstall process, Plugins appeared just for a second, teasing me like a fly on a friend’s forehead before it flew away a moment later. “Agh!” I said that out loud. I discussed this dilemma with my unflappable friend, who suggested without any flap whatsoever that it sounded like something corrupt in the wp-admin directory or the wp-includes directory. OK, sounds good to me. So I download the WP 3.3 zip file, extract, and manually overwrite. But… still no Plugins menu (or Tools, but who cares about that one, right?).

An Accidental Mouseover…

As I was shaking my head and beginning to think, “Hey, maybe Joomla’s not that bad after all,” my wandering mouse, as though guided by the WordPress gods themselves, touched the Settings menu, which then appeared to be much larger than normal. And there, in the middle of the Settings menu, hid my Plugins and Tools items. “Wow,” I say out loud. “How in the world did that happen?!?”

Then I Asked the Professor…

I credit my quick learning of WordPress to the creative teaching of one Benjamin Bradley, the Professor at WebDesign.com. I sent him the screenshot to the left, and his first response was, “Impressive.” Then he reminded me of the sage wisdom I’ve heard him utter at least twice before in webinars. If WordPress is acting screwy, chances are it’s a plugin. So down the list I go disabling and reenabling each plugin on the site. Then as I neared the bottom… SUCCESS!

WP-CMS Broke my Site…

I don’t ever remember using this plugin, but what did I know back then? Not much, that’s for sure. Here was a plugin that (at the time of the explosion) hadn’t been updated in almost 900 days. In the WP Plugin Directory under Compatibility with your version of WordPress, it just said “ROFL.” (Not really.) No way was this plugin, that probably used to do a great job tweaking admin menus, able to work with WP 3.3. It was like trying to plug an Atari cartridge into an iPad. And in all its efforts to work as it was intended, it ended up hiding Plugins and Tools inside Settings.

The Moral of this Story…

“Remember what the Professor taught you.” (I wrote that for me.) If you blow up WordPress, chances are you blew it up the old fashioned way. Some screwy plugin didn’t work.

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