How to Activate WordPress Plugin Manually Through phpMyAdmin

Something went wrong on the long road from New York to California while I was deactivating a plugin used by my WordPress website. And, it made the whole front page of my website look blank. I couldn’t figure out exactly where the mistake was.

Anyway, I opened phpMyAdmin to check the website’s database. I checked the value of the option_value column of the active_plugins row in the option_name column in the *** _ options table of the database.

The SQL command to find this value is:

SELECT option_value FROM wtr_options WHERE option_name = 'active_plugins'

The result of the query will look like the following image:

The value I found in the option_value column is as follows:

a:5:{i:0;s:37:"breadcrumb-navxt/breadcrumb-navxt.php";i:2;s:27:"redirection/redirection.php";i:4;s:31:"shared-counts/shared-counts.php";i:5;s:49:"webtechriser-companion/webtechriser-companion.php";i:6;s:41:"wtr-articlemegabox/wtr-articlemegabox.php";}

WordPress stores the information of the active plugins in the _options table as serialized data. WordPress generates this data using the serialize function of PHP. Of course, WordPress has its own maybe_serialize wrapper function for creating serialized data.

I formatted this serialized data for ease of understanding. Here is what I found:

a:5:{
    i:0;s:37:"breadcrumb-navxt/breadcrumb-navxt.php";
    i:1;s:27:"redirection/redirection.php";
    i:2;s:31:"shared-counts/shared-counts.php";
    i:3;s:49:"webtechriser-companion/webtechriser-companion.php";
    i:4;s:41:"wtr-articlemegabox/wtr-articlemegabox.php";
}

Here, a:5 with WordPress means that 5 plugins are currently being used on this site. Indicates the number of plugins from i:0 to i:4 in the curly bracket ({…}). In the first item, the semicolon next to i:0 is followed by a string with “s” in s:37, and the number “37” indicates the path of the plugin and the length of the plugin’s file name.

Here I found that the name of one of my plugins is not in this entry. So, I replaced a:5 with a:6. I added another item entry in the curly bracket.

a:6:{
    i:0;s:37:"breadcrumb-navxt/breadcrumb-navxt.php";
    i:1;s:27:"redirection/redirection.php";
    i:2;s:31:"shared-counts/shared-counts.php";
    i:3;s:49:"webtechriser-companion/webtechriser-companion.php";
    i:4;s:41:"wtr-articlemegabox/wtr-articlemegabox.php";
    a:5;s:39:"q2w3_fixed_widget/q2w3_fixed_widget.php";
}

Caution

Your website may not work properly if the values you changed in the database are incorrect.

I recommend backing up your site files and databases before making any changes to the database, so that, if something goes wrong, you can restore your site from backup.