Can a localhost plugin make changes to the online website?
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I am making a new design with a new theme for a fully-functional wordpress blog/website (with a dozen plugins, a mailing list, plenty of users and bugs due to its significant age).
I copied the website files from FTP and set up the website locally with WAMP, not yet having connected to the local database copy. The local website didn’t work, because it required a database, which made sense.
Problem: Shortly after taking it down (we considered a different approach), the ConvertKit plugin (for mailing lists) had suddenly offered to send out e-mails to REAL SUBSCRIBERS on the ACTUAL ONLINE WP WEBSITE that wasn’t local (which was not expected or welcomed).
Question 1: Is it possible, that the plugin somehow connected from the local server to the online website through the internet and it’s API key? Or is it a coinsidence, that ConvertKit bugged out around the same time and decided to act on its own?
Question 2: If plugins can alter their state from a local server (even without the database connected) to the separate online website, is there a way to freeze them or their connection to the internet without having to turn them off? I would need to test the whole blog/website locally with the new design and all of the plugins turned on to see if anything conflicts.
If the solution is to just delete all the usernames, passwords, API keys and similar from plugins to stop them from connecting to the actual website, is there something else I should remember to disconnect on local server? Wouldn’t like anything of sorts to happen again. None of this has ever come up when creating websites from scratch.
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