The Plugin That Broke My Blog

I am always discovering and installing plugins on my blog. Then every so often I will clean up the unused ones. I may even delete them if I just get tired of them. I feel that there is a plugin for virtually anything you want to do with your blog.

You have to be careful about adding plugins that you may not be familiar with. Some can actually do more harm than good for your blog, and if you don’t understand code or the in’s and out’s of WordPress, you could crash your entire site and you may need to hire someone to repair it for you.

I feel that I am pretty responsible about the plugins I add. After all, I am That Tech Chick.

I installed a plugin called FeedWordpress. The plugin can pull feeds that you specify and post the content to your blog either by publishing the article or in draft. I thought the plugin would be helpful in pulling in content from one of my affiliate sources. Using the plugin would save me time from having to manually create my affiliate links. I set the plugin to pull the affiliate feed and put the posts in draft until I wanted to look at them, edit them and publish them.

Over the weekend I found that I could not view my edit.php file. This is the file that shows when you click on posts in the backend of your WordPress blog. When I did try to view the page, it was entirely blank.

Of course, when you have an issue with your blog the first step should be to deactivate any plugins you have installed. After doing this, I still had the same issue. I also noticed that the last post that was published was one of those affiliate posts that should have went to draft. But I could not do anything to edit the post or even delete it. So I made sure I deactivated and deleted the FeedWordpress plugin.

The next step I took was to log in to FTP and overwrite my WordPress installation. I figured if I could not view an actual file that was within WordPress the issue may have been caused by the last WordPress update. But again, this made no changes to my blank edit.php file.

I decided to dig further, this time into my database. I ran a check on my tables and even ran a repair just in case. Still nothing.

Then I went in to actually view the tables. I did find that some of the old plugins that I had deleted over the course of the 2 years I have been blogging, had left some database tables. I deleted those. Then I checked out the post table in the database. I decided to delete a few of the drafts that the FeedWordpress plugin had created. Still, I had a blank post.php page.

All of this took me most of the day on Sunday starting at about 6:30am. I had even called my close blogging and design friends and woke her up at 7:30am for help. On Monday I had to go to work, but of course I was thinking of nothing but my broken blog. I called my blogging friend, Kat, and asked her to login and try to see if she could delete that last post that the plugin had posted to my site from the database post table. When she logged into the database to check it out, she had noticed that the FeedWordpress plugin had made 100′s of draft posts since that last post that was published. I told her she could delete every draft I had on my blog, and to make sure she deleted the post that the FeedWordpress plugin published.

I eagerly waited a few moments while Kat deleted the posts and drafts from the table. Then she said the magic words….. IT’S BACK UP!

I was so happy and thankful that Kat was there to help me when I was at work and could not login to my database. Now my blog is back up and running and I am a happy camper.

The moral of the story is that anyone can mess up their blog. And sometimes doing things the long was can be the better way in the long run.

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