Disable Plugins

Description

One of WordPress’ biggest bottlenecks is that it loads every single plugin that
is active on your WordPress installation on every single post/page no matter
whether they are needed for that post/page or not. This plugin will allow you
to create simple rewrite rules to exclude a plugin or plugins from any URI
pattern match. This is a great way to reduce the memory footprint, SQL queries
run at page load, load times, and improve site response speed.

This is NOT a normal WordPress plugin, but an mu (must use) plugin and requires
special installation instructions. Please see the installation section for more
information.

Requirements: PHP5+, WordPress 2.9.x+

Installation

Create a /wp-content/mu-plugins/disable-plugins-rules directory if the plugin
has not created one for you already. Create a rules file for each site your
WordPress installation is running, naming the file after the host name for
the site followed by a .rules extension. For example mywordpresssite.com.rules
would be a rules set for mywordpresssite.com.

Populate your rules using regular expression pattern matches and plugin base
names on each line of your rules file. For example, to exclude the Hello Dolly
and Akisment plugins from being loaded on your home page, you would write
a rules file that looks like:

# Prevent the Hello Dolly plugin from loading on the home page
^\/$ hello
# Prevent the Akisment plugin from loading on the home page
^\/$ akismet

You will need to write a rule for each plugin that will be excluded for each
pattern that you wish to exclude that plugin from. C style comments are
allowed in your rules file to document your rules.

FAQ

Q. How do I format my exception rule?

This is pretty easy to do, just two pieces to each line – the regular expression pattern and the plugin’s basename (usually the folder or file name of the plugin). See the installation section for an example of how this might look.

Q. Will this work on a multisite installation?

This plugin is made to run with multisite in mind, but it has not been tested with a multisite installation yet.

Q. How do you write regular expressions and do you have any good tools for writing them?

If you’re asking this question, you may want to consider a different plugin to help manage your site’s plugin use, but you can check out the following resources:

• Good information on regular expressions – Regular Expressions
• A nice cheat sheet for writing regular expressions – Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet
• A great library of regular expression patterns – Regular Expression Library
• An excellent tool for testing patterns – RegexPal Testing Tool

Unfortunately, I really can’t do much support for this plugin, but time permitting I will continue to develop it. I am considering an admin interface for easier management, but thats down the road a bit.

Reviews

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

1.0.1

• Update compatible to version number

1.0.0

• Initial release