Maria’s Guides

A plugin goes bad and causes weird side effects.

I was checking e-mail and moderating comments on this blog early this morning. (I’m a morning person.)

I’d just entered a comment on my blog when I got a weird error message that I didn’t really pay attention to. When I moved on to another page, there were 8 lines of gibberish above the header. On every page I viewed. Before Firefox said, “To hell with this,” and crashed. Several times.

I had a problem.

Netscape could view the page — but with the gibberish.

wickenburg-az.com, which lives on the same server and uses the same software, worked fine. (Whew!) That narrowed it down a bit.

I restarted the computer. The problem didn’t go away.

I accessed the server from home and restarted Apache. The problem didn’t go away.

Dang.

I went to the office at 7:30 AM and restarted the server computer. The problem didn’t go away.

I analyzed the source code of the bad pages — which would appear on Firefox at the office. (That could be because my office computer has a faster, more modern processor and a heck of a lot more RAM.) It pointed to php files used by WordPress to display pages and do its magic. All the files looked right.

I looked at the contents of the database with CocoaMySQL. It looked okay. But then again, I didn’t look at all the contents. And I really didn’t know what to look at.

I thought it might be the gravatars plug in, which I’d been fiddling with tha morning. I disabled it. And I got a weird error message that might have been the same one I’d gotten earlier that morning. This time I paid attention. It mentioned duplicate headers and a couple of files by name. Hmm.

I took a deep breath and went online to WordPress support. I searched the Codex and support forums. I didn’t find an answer. So I posted a message in the support forum. I made the mistake of including the bad code, so when I saved it, the message got cut off at the bad code. Dumb. I used my back button to revise the message and post it. That created a second message with the same title. Really dumb.

But Samboll, another member, was right on it. He made two suggestions. The second one pointed to a Codex document that explained why the header error message might appear. I thought the header error message was a secondary problem — the first was the gibberish characters — so I didn’t have much hope in it solving the problem. But I had nothing else to go on, so I read the Codex piece and followed its instructions.

And that’s how I tracked down the bad file: srg_clean_archives.php, which is the plugin for the Archives feature I installed the other day. When I opened the file, it was filled with junk.

Now I don’t know how the file went bad, but there was no doubt in my mind that it was bad. It didn’t even show up in the list on the Plugins administration panel. I deleted it (it took two tries) and reloaded the site’s home page. Voila! Problem solved.

Of course, now my Archives page didn’t work right.

So I went back to Sporatic Nonsense’s Clean Archives 1.5 page and downloaded a fresh copy of the plugin. I installed it, activated it, and everything is back to normal.

Total time lost to this problem and troubleshooting (not counting the time to write about it): about 2 hours.

The moral of this story: pay attention to error messages.