Site broke, plugin dissapeared from FTP making it impossible to fix

First off, this did not break a live site, just my testing subdomain.

Like others that have used this plugin have found, PHP syntax errors can really break the site. The fix people talk about involves going into FTP and manually turning off the plugin / making fixes.

For whatever reason, when I went into CP file manager or FTP, the folder for “my custom functions” was completely gone. That was weird. Had other people look to confirm I’m not crazy.

Perhaps I could have copied the working version from my main site with some adjustments. But I thought it would be faster to do a clean clone of my live site, which has a bit more content now than our subdomain. Win/win, right?

Never got the chance, as even in Icognito, caching turned off, etc., the syntax error message remained. After deleting the SQL database to try and get a clean WP install going, the syntax error message never went away. I deleted everything in the subdirectory. Still got the syntax error message there, many hours later. It’s pretty strange.

So we just made a new subdomain instead.

My lesson? Definitely use the subdomain and run EVERYTHING through a PHP syntax error checker first.

Posting here in case there’s something I missed or this problem happens to anyone else (or devs can be aware).