One of my gripes in WordPress plugin development is the function add_action() with the admin_menu property as there’s no easy way to disable a erroneous plugin in the WordPress Administration without editing that plugin file.

I often find myself digging through my active WordPress site database when developing custom WordPress plugins and theme solutions, thanks to the WordPress development team you can disable plugins by editing the active_plugins record within the wp_options table as follows…

1. Open PHPMyAdmin and connect to your WordPress site database
2. Open the wp_options table
3. Browse the contents of wp_options until you locate the active_plugins record
4. To deactivate a single plugin decrement the value of a (eg. 4 to 3)
5. Remove the statement from the initial declaration of i to the ; following the declared plugin path
6. Save changes

Example contents of active_plugins record

a:3:{i:0;s:19:”akismet/akismet.php”;i:1;s:41:”popularity-contest/popularity-contest.php”;i:2;s:15:”stats/stats.php”;}