Trouble with the "Plugins" menu

[Maria Oliver]

Good morning Bill,

I hope you can help me with this…

I’ve been having some issues with the “plugins” menu of the WP dashboard. When I click on it, it simply doesn’t do anything, all I get is a white screen. Cannot see the installed plugins (which basically was a BWS contact form), or use the editor, or install new ones. That menu item is totally unresponsive.

To make matters worse, now the same is happening with the “Settings” menu, where I can click and use every other option but the -General- settings. Same behavior, unresponsive, circle spinning on the top of the window, to end up with a white screen. Everything else works fine and the site is up.

I’ve tried with different browsers, different devices and different OS. Same thing in all of them.

Any clue?

Thanks!

María

[Bill Robbins]

Hello Maria,

That doesn’t sound good at all. Here’s what I would try first. Go to the updates section in your WordPress dashboard (it’s in the top section). At the top of that screen there is an option to reinstall the current version of WordPress. Go ahead and do that. Occasionally that will fix odd admin issues like that.

If it doesn’t, then I would try this next. Use either a FTP program or the file browser that’s in your web host’s control panel to go to the wp-content/plugins folder. What we want to do here is rename all the folders for your plugins adding a 1 to the end of each of them. That would change akismet to akismet1 for example. That should manually deactivate all the plugins.

Then try going back to the plugins section of your admin and see if it will come up again. There should be an error message at the top relating to the plugins being deactivated if it worked.

If it does, then try renaming the folders back, one by one until the plugin screen stops working again.

Let me know how that goes and we’ll go on from there,
Bill

[Maria Oliver]

Hi again Bill,

thanks for your help; I tried with the options you gave me, but couldn’t get very far… The “updates” menu is unresponsive as well, and after renaming the only pluging I have installed through the file manager of my hosting company, WordPress says that I don’t have any active pluggins,(nor a contact form on the website anymore, for that matter…) but still won’t let me access the “install new” submenu. Totally unresponsive. Same with Settings\General.

I’m completely lost, so I’ve gotten in touch with the hosting company too, to see if they see something wrong from their end.

🙁

Thanks again for your patience…

María

[Bill Robbins]

Hello María,

I am so sorry that’s happening. If your hosting company is willing to help, they would honestly be in the best spot to resolve things for you.

Just in case I would make a backup of everything you have. You can download the wp-content folder from your server via FTP. That will have all of the files you’ve uploaded, plus themes and plugins.

Then if the tools menu is still working you could export a copy of your content from the database.

You could also make a copy of the database with the phpMyAdmin in your web host’s control panel. There is an export feature there that you can use.

That way if you have to start out with a new WordPress installation, you will still have your content.

Take care,
Bill

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