upgrade messes up

Posting a link to the site in question would be a good start ??

When you de-activate the plugin, does it appear as inactive in the plugins list? If so, there’s no chance that it’s actually causing the site to “disappear”, by which I assume you mean the home page becomes a white screen with nothing on it. It has to be in conjunction with something else.

like what?

site is https://www.ds2030.com/

when it’s deactivated, all that is left is the nav bar

Can you confirm that on the WordPress admin, under the plugin list, it says the plugin is not active? If the plugin is not active, none of its code is executed which means something else must be interfering.

When I upgraded, the theme’s FB share button on homepage excerpts and posts disappeared (the theme’s Twitter & Google+ buttons still appear). I tested all plugins, but this only happens with social media feather plugin.

there’s no chance that it’s actually causing the site to “disappear”. Really? No chance at all? I’ve tested EVERY plugin. This plugin is the ONLY one that, when deactivated/activated, causes what I’m describing.

Something very fascinating just happened. When I went into header.php and deleted
<?php echo synved_social_follow_markup(); ?> to remove your plugin’s social icons from the nav bar, then deactivated your plugin, guess what happened? My site didn’t disappear like before. See, there WAS a chance that it was this plugin, which is what I stated from the beginning. But it still doesn’t explain why my theme’s internal Facebook share icon is not showing up on the homepage excerpts and the posts.

Well, you didn’t mention that you added that code to your theme… It seems obvious that if you add a function call to a certain plugin’s code, WordPress will need for that plugin to be activated if it wants to access its code.

It’s not a fault in the plugin, as it has no way of knowing whether you’re calling its code from somewhere else.

Modifications to theme’s code are not necessary for the plugin to function and they’re an advanced feature that only experienced PHP developers should take advantage of.

I will look more into the facebook icon disappearing and will let you know.

“It seems obvious that if you add a function call to a certain plugin’s code, WordPress will need for that plugin to be activated if it wants to access its code.”

[ Moderator note: the next text has been de-capped into lower case. Please do not do that again, it’s considered rude. ]

i did not say the problem was that the plugin’s code could not be accessed. neither did i say that social media feather icons were not working. i said that the activation of the upgraded plugin messed up my theme’s own social icons (in the posts & excerpts) and when i tried to prevent it from happening by inactivating your upgraded plugin, the deactivation of your upgraded plugin made my site disappear.

In the WordPress Plugin directory, the following is in the ‘Description’ section of YOUR plugin:

Template Tags
If you don’t want to use shortcodes but instead prefer to use PHP directly, there are 2 PHP functions/template tags you can use.
For sharing buttons you can use:
synved_social_share_markup();
For following buttons you can use:
synved_social_follow_markup();

So YOUR own description says that could be done. Anyway, I put the 2nd piece of code into the header.php to add FB & RSS cons to the nav bar MONTHS ago, and it worked ‘(social media feather’ icons were in nav bar). Today, I upgraded to the new version of your plugin, and it still worked (‘social media feather’ icons were in nav bar); HOWEVER, 1) the theme’s own FB share icon (in posts) disappeared, AND 2) the entire site disappeared once your plugin was disabled.

I apologize if it caused any trouble but you shouldn’t be changing PHP code around if you’re not a developer. Anyone who’s done any WordPress development would know that calling into a template tag provided by a plugin would require the plugin itself to be active.

Generally you add a check for the template tag existence before calling it. I’ll make sure to add a note in the description about this.

Regarding the facebook share icon disappearing when the plugin is active, I’d happily investigate this further to find a fix but currently the plugin seems disabled on your site.