Did you know that you have the ability to edit a WordPress Plugin that you are using on your site? Actually, any WordPress Plugin can be modified and customized, if you know the php language.
When you enter your WordPress Dashboard and click on the Plugins panel on the left hand side, you will see all the plugins that you have loaded on your site. Remember that not all of them may be currently activated (if you decided to deactivate one for some reason). You can either click on the Editor link within the Plugin Panel (on the left)
or, you can click on the individual entry if you wan to edit a WordPress Plugin (on the right); when a plugin is activated, you have the choices to Deactivate, Edit, or change the settings.
Clicking that will open a text editor window where the plugin file you want to change will be displayed.
WARNING! If you are not a programmer, or you do NOT know PHP (the language of WordPress and WordPress Plugins) this can be very dangerous! Ask anyone who is taking a beginner programming course and they will tell you that one character can break an entire program!
Even if you know what you are doing, it is VERY advisable to make a back up of the file BEFORE you go changing any code. There is an awesome feature of WordPress built into it – you cannot make coding errors when you are editing the plugin file! If the code you write is bad (like it is missing that character), the file will be saved, but you cannot activate the plugin! WordPress will not allow you to have rogue, bad code (well, as far as syntactical errors, that is).
If you decide that you want to give it a shot and edit a WordPress Plugin, remember – you are working with a safety net!
Hey Professor Paul – once again, good posting . . . couple of comments: as you know, I am a programmer (well, at least I played one back in a Smalley School 5th grade play), however I am not trained in PHP . . but at times I have felt compelled to dabble in the editor for both Plugins and themes, with varying success . . . and you are so right, make 1 small mistake and everything can go south on you real fast – and yes you should backup, however, if you do totally screw up a Plugin and don’t backup, you can deactivate it, delete it and reinstall it . . . and you’re back to where you’re started at with the Plugin (however you will lose any Plugin specific settings) – also, you should make/keep copious notes as to what you changed (using screen captures works best for me), since the very next update for that Plugin will most likely overlay your change – hope this helps
All excellent points!
As pointed out, miss a character, delete ‘the wrong thing,’ and the site goes south! In some cases, I can completely disabled a site to the point where a backup had to be restored because I could not get into the site.
You bring up a good point… Just disable the plugin you were using and all is well. However, if you are unable to get to your dashboard then you are in no position to disable (technically, ‘Deactivate’) the plugin.
This leads me to another idea… I will write a post about deactivating a plugin when you cannot deactivate a plugin 馃檪