Debugging WordPress Plugins

My website has a bug. This site was designed with WordPress and the stylesheet was customized to give it a unique look and feel. Then the features were enhanced by installing a variety of plugins.

Our favorite plugins that we use on this site include the following:

• Admin Favicon – It assists in adding a favicon to the website
• Akismet – Blocks Spam comments in the Blog
• All in One SEO Pack – Adds Meta Tag fields to posts and pages for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Blog in Blog – Adds the blog structure on the Blog Page of this website
• Broken Link Checker – Checks posts and pages for broken links and missing images and notifies us on the dashboard if any are found
• Dave’s WordPress Live Search – Adds “live search” functionality to the Search field
• DBC Backup – Adds automatic backup to website
• Fixed Social Buttons – Creates attractive Social Media buttons on this site
• Subscribe2 – Notifies an email list when new entries are posted and adds a sidebar widget to easily customize and display our  subscribers stats
• Tweet Old Posts -Plug-in for tweeting our old posts randomly to Twitter
• Wordbooker – Automatically posts our blog updates to our Facebook Fan Page
• WP-Cumulus – Creates Tag Cloud in left Sidebar

We highly recommend all of these plugins.

WordPress is an open source PHP programming tool that adds structure and Content Management to a website. WordPress sites are very stable, functional and Google-friendly. I think there are really only two negatives about WordPress. One is that WordPress sites tend to load just a bit slower than a straight HTML site. That’s because the site is database-driven and each page is built on demand.

The other negative is that a plugin can have a bug. I think I have a bug in a plugin. In this case, the plug-in is the Subscribe2 plugin. Subscribe2 is generating a browser error when I save my post. At least that is my theory. I contacted the developer of the plugin and submitted the error. I was told to “deactivate” all of the other plugins before publishing my next blog entry.

So…

This is the test! I am writing this article so that I can test my Subscribe2 plug-in. I will deactivate all of my plugins before I publish and see if I still get the error. If I don’t get the error, I will be able to tell the publisher of the plugin that there is a bug and hopefully they will be able to assist in getting him to fix it.