This morning I was up early. There’s work to be done. And that site had a critical error that I definitely wanted to fix. But yeah, I couldn’t access the FTP. Or even a DirectAdmin.
So I installed the File Manager plugin. And renamed the plugin folder, to see if that would still have the same problem. For a moment that was a stupid move. Even a very stupid move, if I do say so myself. And I therefore feverishly searched di Google for the problem of the Plugins folder being no longer accessible (in wp-content). But nope, nada. No solution, except you do need FTP and DirectAdmin access.
Then suddenly I got that idea. In the functions.php of your theme you can rename a file or folder with a workaround of adding a single command (rename(ABSPATH . ‘/wp-content/plugins.*/’, ABSPATH . ‘/wp-content /plugins/’); ). And that worked. Suddenly my plugins folder was there again and even better, it worked. I was then able to remove that line from functions.php and reactivate the plugins one by one. To see where the problem lay. However, no plugin caused this error.
Later, much later, I did get the FTP data, as well as access to the DirectAdmin, the server part behind that website. And found out PHP8 was already deployed. I scaled that back to PHP7.4 and after that the critical issue, which WordPress kept shouting after updating a page, was finally gone.
I have been arguing for years with WordPress itself not to use the FileManager as a plugin but as a main function. I then hear from specialists that this is absolutely not possible. While I used to work with another content management system like PivotX, which did have that function. So it just depends on what the priorities of WordPress are. I think I’m going to write another Open Letter to the people behind WordPress.org. You will most certainly hear about this subject again…
