Disabling plugin breaks site

  • Resolved ccaihc

    (@ccaihc)


    7 years, 9 months ago

    I was asked to debug an issue by a client, specifically when they disable certain plugins the site will stop printing content. Here’s what I’ve discovered:

    1. Disabling the plugin (Youst in this case) causes any content to no longer be printed on any page. However, the header and footer will still exist in the DOM for every page as well.
    2. There are no errors in the log.
    3. I can disable Yoast, and enable another plugin (WP Sypmosium), and the site starts working again. So one of these 2 plugins has to be activated for the site to print content.

    As far as I can tell, there is no linkage between these two plugins. I’m sort of at a loss as to what to try next. I’ve checked the functions.php file for calls to either of these plugins and I don’t see anything. Any ideas what could cause something like this?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    To rule out any issue with these two working together, I recommend bringing the issue to the attention of the authors of these plugins:

    Yoast: https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/wordpress-seo

    WP Sypmosium: I could not find a plugin in the WP plugin directory by this name:
    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/search.php?q=WP+Sypmosium

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by t-p.

    Also you may need to see if it is caching issue.

    And also WordPress Yoast have some functions , theme authors might call in their themes like one I have used recently in a project was about getting Primary Category term selected. So maybe that is breaking the site when plugin is no more there. You might look into Php error log if you find any hint there…

    I’ve bumped into this issue a few times with custom built themes. Check that the templates call the_post() somewhere. If a template doesn’t implement the main loop, WordPress can’t initialize the data used by functions like the_content etc. Yoast does something which either calls the_post or setup_postdata before loading the templates which populates the data WordPress needs.

    More here: https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/267808/post-content-blank-after-disabling-yoast-seo

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 5 months ago by Joe Maller.
    Thread Starter ccaihc

    (@ccaihc)

    Thanks Joe, I did end up figuring out what was causing it and you are exactly correct. I probably should have posted here that I had figured it out!

    All the templates on this clients site were not properly implementing the main loop. The Yoast plugin, like you say, does in fact call the_post somewhere in it’s stack. Turning it off killed that call, causing the templates to break.

    I would upvote your stackexchange question and answer, but of course I don’t have enough reputation. Great feature on those sites, lol.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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