2 min read

Bulk Deactivate

Bulk Deactivate

In September this year we went to WordCamp Europe in Bulgaria. One of the big messages from the WordCamp was to give back to the community. Matt Mullenweg calls this Five for the Future and you can read more on his blog about how we should all be contributing back to the community.

This is our first plugin release on the WordPress Repository. We hope it is a really useful tool for the rest of the community.

Why did we make this tool?

We debug a lot of websites. Sometimes we find a bug and need to contact the plugin author for support. The first question asked is the most important:

Can you deactivate all other plugins and try with the default 2014 Theme

This is sound advice. If the plugin doesn’t have a problem with a basic setup then you can narrow down the problem to a conflict with another plugin.

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What does Bulk Deactivate do?

Well, the clue is the name. It saves a list of all the active plugins that are deactivated. Sometimes a site will have 50 plugins. Say 30 are active. Rather than fiddling with the default plugin manager and remembering those 30 active plugins you can deactivate those 30 with a single click. You save a list of these active plugins as well.

You can then activate each plugin one by one, or a group or all of them easily. This is a super useful tool for discovering which plugin is causing the conflict.

In development

We have this code freely available on GitHub for anyone to contribute and improve upon. If you are a developer then feel free to head over and add some sparkle.

Bulk Deactivate on GitHub
Download the Plugin from the WordPress Plugin Repository

Thanks to Sarah Gooding for posting an article about this release on WP Tavern.