Deactivate All WordPress Plugins Via the Database
By davemoyer, posted October 20, 2009 at 2:05 am | No Comments »
As discussed on WordCast 73 with Cali Lewis on BlogWorld and New Media Expo 2009, sometimes a plugin doesn’t work as it should and ends up crashing your blog.
If you’ve gone through all the steps talked about on that episode (deactivate the plugin, rename/delete it via FTP), it’s come down to the database and the force deactivation of plugin functions through a database editor like phpMyadmin.
After logging into your database using phpMyadmin or a similar MySQL database manager, you need to select your WordPress install’s database and browse inside the wp_options table. (If you’ve followed our security guidelines, however, and changed your database prefix to something other than “wp”, you shall find the table under another name with another prefix.)
Find the column called active_plugins and edit it. You should see code similar to this in the options_value field:
a:31:{i:0;s:13:"AddMySite.php";i:1;s:19:"akismet/akismet.php";
i:2;s:23:"all_in_one_seo_pack.php";i:3;s:16:"authenticate.php";
i:4;s:28:"breadcrumb-navigation-xt.php";i:5;s:18:
"codeautoescape.php";i:6;s:37:Each of these lines represent active plugins in your blog. If you’ve been unsuccessful in deactivating them through your WordPress administration interface, then simply delete all this code to force the issue.
Thanks to DailyBlogTips for the sample code (above) and their recent write-up on the issue which explained this process.
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This is a great post and addresses an issue I’ve had many times before. For some, finding the active_plugins row could be difficult, here is an sql command that will pull it right up:
SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’;
Obviously, change the wp_ if you have a different prefix.
To read the whole post, it can be found here: http://alwayswordpress.com/blogging/the-menacing-white-screen-of-death-with-wordpress