4.0 Upgrade makes ALL plugins disappear

My entire site is plugin driven, but the issue happened immediately after a Gravity Forms upgrade and before th 4.0 update. Of course Gravity is thowing it on WordPress. I will attemp to rename my folder and reinstall.

Ok, good to know that I am not the only one to loose all my plugins, but worse, my dashboard is completed empty, not just unpopulated, I can not even access the theme.

And I am new to wordpress, it only happened to one of my sites, not all of them. On the admin page the left index of the screen is empty.

Dashboard has activity and wodrpress updates is the only showing I have with a correct history in activity.

The only other listing is Profile

then collapse screen.

/Users/Michelle/Desktop/Screen Shot 2014-09-22 at 9.35.00 am.png Screenshots
/Users/Michelle/Desktop/Screen Shot 2014-09-22 at 9.35.00 am.png

Site is working, but completely unable to update the site, change

Also on another issue, a password update went wrong and we can not work restore that either.

https://thehouselaos.com

Hi. I had a friend try renaming the plugins folder as suggested and now I have a line of code showing up on the top of my site and I can’t log on.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Here’s my site https://giselleaguiar.com/social-media-training/

And this is the code I get when I try to log in:

define(‘WP_CACHE’, true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager define( ‘WPCACHEHOME’, ‘/home/content/62/8635362/html/social-media-training/wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/’ ); //Added by WP-Cache Manager
Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/content/62/8635362/html/social-media-training/wp-config.php:3) in /home/content/62/8635362/html/social-media-training/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 1173?

Sorry, but I don’t call this “resolved”.

I think I’m just going to go much more static and try and find a different platform I’m not constantly screwing with.

I’m always on the road and always trying to get documentation to my customers and I can’t be futzing with WordPress from some random hotel in some random city at 2 in the morning when I have to be on a customer site first thing in the morning.

It’s been a great run, but I need to do something else.

Where and how this topic is solved???????
In the italian wordpress forum 3 people have this problem, and all 3 have been affected by virus.
The virus change
wp-config.php
wp-content/themes/index.php
wp-content/plugins/index.php
and has created a new folder in plugins called as research_plugin_eCMA or something like that.

Hi. I have a similar problems regularly these past three months on a particular site, and therefore even prior to WP 4. Every so often, I’d go into the WP Dashboard to find that suddenly all plugins have been disabled, and it states there are no plugins. When I try to install them again, it fails, just as people above have experienced.
To combat this I have had to delete the plugin folders, that are in fact still there, via ftp, and then reinstall each and every one. I have a bare minimum now, so know it wasn’t a particular one causing it. This might be triggered by a new theme update becoming available, as it has occurred when they have come along, but the plugin disabling is apparent before any updating is actually attempted, even though the site works ok at that point. as soon as you try to reinstall or generally edit content, the site then noticeably loses it’s look.
So, although I have been able to get around it, it’s not ideal to have to do that every time and whilst the client loses patience with it all. I’m not very techy so all that background coding stuff and permissions is lost on me, but thanks to elmanisero, I have looked at the config and index files he mentioned and there was a whole load of code there at the beginning of each, which wasn’t there on similar files on other sites when I compared (I didn’t see a research_plugin etc folder though). I have deleted that extra code and perhaps this virus has indeed been causing the problems. Who knows. We’ll just have to carry on and hope that nothing else happens.

I have found the answer to this. In each of the .php files in your plugins, you will find a looooooooooong piece of code that has been added (either by the 4.0 upgrade or something else). It starts out with the following:

if(!isset($GLOBALS["\x61\156\x75\156\x61

delete the whole rest of the line of code and your plugin will reappear

Alright – after a very long and frustrating day trying to figure this out here’s what I found – comes down to that suspicious looking code at the top of my plugins and themes.

This is what’s going on for me:
I updated to 4.0 and then i got this message “The plugin plugin-name/root-file.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.”
and then all the plugins disappeared.

I thought maybe it was cause they were not updated so I moved them to a temp folder and manually installed more current versions of those plugins. Worked but only shortly. They all disappeared again and I was not sure what was triggering this behavior.

Themes are not behaving this way however. That’s when I also noticed the funny code in the plugins and themes. Now I just do not know what to do with that. Anybody?
I guess I could remove it but I’m pretty sure (based on error message “invalid header” messages I keep getting and how this is happening) that the plugins disappear after this code is injected after installation. It’s gonna keep happening until we know where this code is coming from and how to stop it…which – unfortunately – is not something I can offer. :/

BTW, I just checked the plugins pre-install – they don’t have this funny code at the top.
The really long weird code is exactly the same everywhere. I’d post it here but it stars the same as JayColvin’s code so I think it might be the same for everyone. Ends like this:
$jookwirtbe=$ozrontrkdq-1; ?> Starts and ends the same way in plugins and themes.

BTW, I had a long list of plugins originally. Then I reinstalled 9 of them and those disappeared. Then I re-installed 4 of them and then those disappeared.
The last 4 I had re-installed were:
Testimonials widget
Smooth Slider
All in One Event
Nextgen Gallery

I am having the same issue. I try to install a plugin or a theme and I receive the same error:

Downloading install package from https://downloads.www.ads-software.com/plugin/nextgen-gallery.zip…

Unpacking the package…

Installing the plugin…

Destination folder already exists. ….wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/

Plugin install failed.

I have deleted the plugin’s folder via FTP and tried reinstalling, and it still gives me this error. Randomly, 2 or 3 plugins DID successfully install, however most do not. I have repeated the process of deleting the plugin and trying to reinstall to no avail. I have NOT found the lines of code that JayCalvin mentioned above.

It’s almost as if WP creates the directory before checking to see if there’s a directory — like the steps are out of order? Interestingly, I have no issue at all on another site running WP 4.0.

I’m not a good enough programmer to understand it. I’m just super frustrated! I can’t proceed with work on my client’s sites without getting this resolved!!! Is there any workaround? Can I install an older version of WP? TIA

…Aaaand, now everything is working. The only thing I did was delete the Mojo Marketplace WP Plugin that the simplescripts installer automatically added when it configured my WP installation. I have no idea if that did something, but thought I’d mention it to see if it helps anyone else. Good luck!

Alright – after a very long and frustrating day trying to figure this out here’s what I found – comes down to that suspicious looking code at the top of my plugins and themes.

OK, this works! I edited all the crap you suddenly see that appears to have been added by 4.0 with the simple code:

<?php
/**

… loaded all the PHP files up for all my plugins and suddenly WP saw them all and life is good again after wasting most of my afternoon.

I had already gone into the archives and re-installed WP v3.9.2 At which point all my plugins were still messed up. Then I went through the folder rename tricks mentioned earlier in this thread, etc, etc.

Nothing worked until I used the fix that Sara came up with.

Thank you Sara!!!!!!

I would love to know from a WP guru what that code was for that got inserted into the plugins at the top of all the PHP files? Obviously its some sort of conditional code, but it sure caused all hell to break loose. When you use a plugin like “Easy Columns” all of your pages look pretty messed up.

I’m glad you got things working again! Just to clarify, are you saying it quit adding the junk php when you deleted the Mojo Marketplace WP Plugin?

I still randomly get the same error message as above, even after deleting that plugin. However, when I ignore it and go to my installed plugins — voila — the plugin IS actually installed and visible and I can activate with no problem. I’m curious why it would still tell me plugin install failed…

*sigh*

Hi, I’ve just upgraded to 4.0.1 and cannot see my plugins on the dashboard (Gallery, Reviews or Comments).

Is there a definitive way to fix this yet? I don’t fancy randomly deleting stuff if I can get things working without losing stuff.

Thanks,
Dave

Hello,

Exactly the same happened to me for two reasons.

Start the investigation in function get_plugins() in wp-admin/includes/plugin.php it has two option in wich it skips the plugin folder eventough it’s in the corect position, it should be at line 237.
Reason #1 – is_readable returns false for the plugin file.
Check CHMOD and CHOWN, it should be the same of a plugin that works usualy user:user for CHOWN and 0644 for CHMOD

Reason #2 – the plugin header (that comments you see in the begining of a plugin) is corrupt, probably caused by a virus.

Try the following to check if the virus is the cause:

In wp-includes/functions.php in get_file_data() function (aproximate line 3883) after the $file_data = fread( $fp, 8192 ); insert the folowing

if(strstr($file,'XXXXX'))
{
echo $file;exit;
print_r($file_data);
exit;
}

This will display the header of your missing plugin. If wordpress does not display something like a comment and shows a code involving
– if(!isset($GLOBALS[
– or any other jibberish code

Delete it from the plugin file and leave just the part wich start with a comment like this

/*
Plugin Name: XXXX

it should then appear in the list.