A couple of days ago I installed two new plugins on this blog: Top Comentators and Recent comments. Both installations went smoothly, the plugins were doing their jobs and I was happy.
Yet, my WordPress administration interface was changed, it was switched back to the WP 1.5 one, although I’m using WP 2.0. I did not bother to sort that out for the time being.
This morning, when one of my readers wanted to subscribe to the feed, he got an error. He dropped me a comment, and I started the investigation:
- I checked my feed with feedvalidator.org and I got the following error message:
Sorry
This feed does not validate.
Source: http://www.alltipsandtricks.com/blog/?feed=rss2
…
- I played around with the wp-rss2.php file until I got dizzy, with no results.
- I looked into the source code of my blog’s main page and I noticed a blank line at the very beginning.
- I read somewhere (sorry, I cannot link there because I dont remember where it was) that writing the posts in Word and using copy-paste may generate such characters, which are invisible on normal pages, but which trigger feeds errors.
- As the harm was already done (yes, I was using Word to write the posts), I tried to deactivate the latest installed plugins, hoping that I won’t need to write again all the posts.
- Recent comments came first; after deactivating it, everything came back to normal: the feed was valid again.
- When I started to write this post, I noticed that the WP 2.0. admin interface was also back to normal.
Conclusions:
- Install only one plugin at a time
- After installation, check the functionality of your blog
- Before installation, do a backup of the blog
- Use only plugins that are well documented, or for which you can find good references from other bloggers (there is a big plugins database available since recently, which is well organized and handy)
- Beware of this version of Recent comments plugin, which made me spend three hours staring at a code I barely understand
4 Comments
I can definitely relate. The worst is upgrading WordPress without following the “recommended practice” of disabling plugins and then everything going wrong.
I was about to do what you are speaking about, Ronald. Luckily, in the last minute I thought to follow the recommendations and disable the plugins before upgrading.
Sorry to bring up an older post, but what Ronald said is exactly what happened to my site a few weeks ago. I upgraded to WP 2.3, did not disable all plugins as I said “Haha, it’s my site, hoho, let’s just do it!”
and I messed up my then-theme completely as files and theme-databases got overwritten and corrupted, respectively. I still have not been able to recover the then-original theme changes and modifications code.
I hate the fact that after de-activating, WP does not keep a list of all de-activated plugins so that you can know which ones to enable, but it is better in the long run also. I think one of the best things to do is to upgrade and test things on a local server instead of the public site. I started doing it again after Ronald suggested it and it really helps.
Hey Bes, I’m sorry to hear that. I did not upgrade to WP 2.3 and I start to think I never will