My site was down for a while on Friday because during my lunch break I decided to update my site. The update that took down my site was HugeIT Portfolio plugin. I do not believe it was due to the plugin itself but do to the update process getting interrupted, confronting visitors to the site with a “500 Internal Server Error”.
In order to fix my site when a plugin takes it down I do the following, if I’m unable to login and disable the plugin:
- Rename the plugins directory to, i.e. disabled_plugins
- Create a directory called plugins
- Log in to the site (all plugins should appear disabled)
- Delete the plugins directory
- Rename the disabled_plugins directory back to plugins
- Go to view your plugins, they should all appear as disabled
- Enable them one by one, checking your site until you find the offender (if you don’t know), if you do then enable all but the offending one
- Delete the offending plug
What you decide to do next is up to you. You can either install it again and reconfigure or find a replacement. I tried to install it again; however, that created another instance of it. With the plugin now appearing twice I thought it best to delete them both as the plugin directory in the plugins folder was only their once. This cleans up the plugin folder.
I was able to install the HugeIT Portfolio plugin again; however, upon activation my site was taken down again. so I had to rename the folder that particular plugin (portfolio-gallery) in order to gain access to my site again. I am now going to delete that plugin and be back on the hunt for a means of setting up a portfolio on my site. I was using Aeolus – Creative Portfolio before; however, activating that one again now I remember why I had switched in the first place. It doesn’t work well with my theme, or at least that’s my guess, as all the text becomes really tiny and makes the site unusable.