On today’s episode, we are going to talk about different ways to troubleshoot theme or plugin error installations right here on Your Website Engineer podcast, Episode #385.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. I’m coming to you from a brand-new studio space, a brand-new office space here in Washington Township, which is Dayton, Ohio. And it may sound just a little goofy today just because I’m still plugging in all the wires and getting all the extension cords and everything set up in my brand-new office space. As I mentioned in a few episodes ago, I talked about how my wife and I and family are moving, and we’re building a new house. We’ll have to be out of our current house by the end of May.

And so, while we’re building, and while we’re renting, and moving, all this kind of stuff, I wanted a home base, a place where I could come and I can work close to where our new house is gonna be, so I can check on that during the day, but also a place where I drop my daughter off at school, I have a few hours to work, and I have my own Wi-Fi, my own setup, I can use my standing desk, and just get a lot of work done. And so, I’ve moved all my podcasting gear here, and so my goal is to always be able to record information here for my podcast, and I think with getting the whole setup done in the next weeks or so, I may be able to get back into doing webinars and other fun things that I just really haven’t had time to do, I really haven’t pursued just because of the fact that I have little kids, and they make noise right above where my office used to be in the living room. I was in the basement, and they were just all the time making noise.

Having my own office space here, and it’s always quiet, gives me the opportunity to take breaks during the day, record short videos, do webinars, or whatever that may look like. So, that’s what I wanted to share, just an update here at the front of the show, talking about where I’ve gone and where I’ve moved from. So, this is just quick, an update here at the top of the show. The first 384 podcasts were all recorded in my home studio, or I guess most of them were, and there was a few of them that I did while traveling. But now, from 385 and on, at least through the next year, I’ll be recording all of the shows right here in my office space. So, that’s kind of a little bit of news to start off the show.

I do have two pieces of announcements and one plugin to share with you today. The first I wanted to share with you today is about the news of GDPR. And what this is is it is a new standard that’s coming out to protect the privacy and information that’s being collected on websites from the European Union, and it’s a really kind of – I don’t know if it’s controversial or not, but it’s making a big deal across all of the platforms out there that take data within WordPress sites. May 25th marks the deadline for compliance for the General Data Protection Regulation, and these new rules apply to any online presence collecting information from residents inside the European Union.

And the compliance is a responsibility of the site owner. Some of this information or some of the pieces of data that may be collected are if you are collecting email addresses, names, and city, and comments from those particular people. So, I’m just posting a link in the show notes here for an article over on wpmudev.org, and it kinda spells out and has a Q&A session with somebody that’s really up front and knows a lot of information. And there is a guide located in there on how to make a plugin compliant with this information, so if you’re running any kind of plugin that has and collects data from a customer or user, then you have to make sure that your plugin is compliant. So, I’ve listed all of that there, and you can check that out.

The other piece of news that I wanna share with you this week is over at wp101.com, and they have tons of video tutorials on how to setup and start using WordPress, they now have an Introduction to MailPoet is a new course that they’ve outlined there. It’s free for all-access pass subscribers. You can get access for this course and all the other courses over on wp101.com for $48.00. You can watch the first intro video there on what MailPoet is, but it’s essentially a way to manage newsletter subscribers from inside your WordPress dashboard. So, if you’re interested in that in any way, shape, or form, check on the link in the show notes for Episode #385.

In the “Is there a plugin for that?” section this week, I do have a nifty one, and this is one that who would’ve thought that this was a plugin? But this is a plugin. It’s got more than 100 active installs, it’s brand new, it’s only been out for two weeks, but it is a plugin called Plugin Notes Plus. And this is a plugin that you may wanna install on client’s websites or even on your own websites, and it gives you a notes field in the plugin section, so if you’re looking through all your plugins, you can leave notes.

It adds an extra column, so you can add, or edit, or delete notes about the plugins, like why did I install this plugin? I installed this plugin to allow collection of email addresses through MailChimp, or this plugin allows us to take different price points in our WooCommerce store, or whatever the case may be. You can add this information there, and so as you’re scrolling through plugins, you can see exactly why a plugin was added and what the reason was for it. So, that’s what Plugin Notes Plus is. You can find that on the WordPress repository, or you can see it in the show notes for Episode #385.

Alright, today, I wanna dive in and talk about different reasons why WordPress plugins or themes may not install properly in your WordPress installation. And I see this every single day when it comes to WooCommerce support. Sometimes people won’t be able to install our theme, or they won’t be able to install any plugins. It’s just a matter of there’s different error messages, and how to interpret them and go through that. So, that’s what I wanna share today. We’re gonna dive in here and just make sure that we know what could be the issue, what may be causing the problem when we’re trying to install a plugin or a theme.

So, the first reason, first thing that could happen is maybe the wrong file format was uploaded. Now, typically, when you buy things, or you buy a plugin or a theme, it’ll come, and it’ll come as a zip file. And if the file is not zipped, then you cannot upload that to the WordPress repository. You can’t use a .rar file or some of these other compressed formats. It has to be in a .zip file. It doesn’t come up in the error message. It says “bad format”, and so you’ll have to make sure that you’ve corrected this format and it’s in a zip file.

Maybe if it’s not in the bad format, another issue that you run into sometimes is you don’t have it in a zip format, so if you use Safari – and I’ve seen this a lot just with Safari – you download a plugin from a repository or you download from somewhere that you’ve purchased, and with Safari, it automatically unzips the plugin, so now you’ve got the folder with all the files inside, and you can’t really do anything with it. You have to zip that back up, so you can upload it to your WordPress directory. So, that’s something to think about, too. It always has to be in a zip file. The zip file is what you have to upload into WordPress.

Another thing that may happen is there could be files missing from that zip folder. So, maybe you’ve tried to upload a zip file, and then you saw an error message that says something more along the lines of “This package could not be installed. No valid plugins were found. Plugin installation failed.” This means that the file that’s contained within the folders was not what WordPress was expecting. So, you can unzip the folder, and you can take a look and make sure it is the right zip file, make sure you’re not uploading some other zip file with a very similar name that you’ve downloaded, like images or something like that.

You wanna check sure that there is files in there that WordPress expects. Usually there is going to be some sort of a main plugin file that’s gonna get all the data and it’s gonna have at the top of it, it’s gonna have the header information, it’s gonna say what the plugin is, the version number, who the author is – things along those lines. And in WordPress, you wanna make sure that it has a index.php file, and it needs a style.css file. Those two things are required for a WordPress theme to be able to be uploaded.

Now, another thing that – just while we’re on the same error message – you may want to make sure that you are uploading it to the right area. We get this a lot that people will come to WooCommerce support, and they’ll say, “I can’t upload this plugin,” and they’re trying to add it as a theme or vice-versa; they’re trying to add a theme as a plugin. And that obviously won’t work because if it’s a plugin, it can’t be installed as a theme because it needs a stylesheet, which it doesn’t have, and it’s not a plugin. It’s not formatted correctly to be a theme. So, you wanna make sure that you’re uploading it to the right area as well.

Sometimes, if you’re purchasing a plugin or you’ve got one off the repository, or maybe you found a free download somewhere that you may see a syntax error of some kind. This is one that maybe you’ve googled, and like I said, you found it online, and there’s either a parse error or a syntax error. And all this means is there’s something wrong in the code. The error can come up if it is trying to edit a theme or a plugin once it’s installed onto your website. If you’re seeing this during the installation, the error lies within the developer, like you might have to go out and reach for and contact the developer to see what may be going on. Sometimes there’s a syntax error because the plugin that you’re trying to install is trying to use the same class as one of the other plugins you have on your site.

So, for an example, I ran into this issue last week was somebody was using our Drip plugin, the Drip email subscriber newsletter thing, and they had another one that was using Drip as well, and it had the same class. Two of the plugins were using the exact same class name, which isn’t allowed. You can only use a class name once. And so, they were getting a fatal error when they tried to activate it because of the fact that the two plugins were clashing with each other. So, if that’s the case, sometimes you may have to deactivate other plugins on your site to get this one activated, and then you can see which one is causing the conflict. But if you do reach out to the plugin developer, they’re more than willing to help out and figure out what could be causing the clash, especially if it’s their plugin. They’re the ones that are supposed to take care of that issue for you. So, that’s in case you’re getting some sort of syntax error.

Other times, and this one I believe I kinda mentioned before, was the wrong zip was uploaded. Sometimes you get this with bigger, multipurpose themes, and so maybe if you downloaded something from themeforest.net or some of the other themes that are out there that come bundled with all kinds of things, and you try to upload that entire zip file, then sometimes you’ll run into issues. So, you may see an error in the same way that the stylesheet is missing, and that may be because in that zip file, now all of a sudden, you’ve got your documentation, you’ve got licenses, there’s licensing agreements, there’s plugins that are needed to upload the theme as well, and then you’ve got the theme and the child theme all bundled into one zip file, and you’ve tried to upload that entire zip file to WordPress. Well, that’s not gonna work.

You’re gonna have to unzip that big zip file that you’ve gotten from your theme when you downloaded it, and then once it’s unzipped, then you can upload the theme files that’s built into there. So, that’s something to think about as well. I’ve done this many of times, and sometimes I’m wondering, “Why is it taking so long to upload this theme?” when the real issue is it’s not really taking that long, but you’re adding all the psd – and this was back in the day when every website had the psd, the Photoshop versions. It was trying to upload that, it was trying to upload all these other plugins that were required with the theme. All of these things it was trying to do all at the same time, and obviously, it’s not gonna work. It uploads all the data first, and then it gives you the error because there’s no stylesheet. So, it’ll take a while, and then it’ll say, “Hey, you don’t have a stylesheet. There is something wrong,” and so, you can go ahead and check on that.

The next error message that you may see is “File size limits are exceeded”. This one I don’t see nearly as much. There used to be a 2-megabyte limit on WordPress, and you could only upload 2 megabytes worth of data at one time. Now, a lot of hosts are expanding that. They’re making it so you can upload a gigabyte worth of information, like pictures, or videos, or whatnot. And so, you don’t see that a whole lot, but if you do, there are information that you can add to a php.ini file this is called. This is found on your server, and you can find it via ftp or your file manager. And basically, you can go in and you can change that upload max file size, you can change the post to max size the memory limit if file uploads are on and max execution time. That’ll specify how long they can try before timing out. So, this will give you a little bit more leeway on how large of a plugin or a theme you’re trying to upload.

And if you are still experiencing these memory type issues or these “File size limits are exceeded”, I recommend checking out and contacting your webhost, and they can definitely help you and try to figure out what may be going on.

And the last bucket contains all the other plugins or all the other error messages that could be out there. And it’s just a matter of going through and just trying to figure out what did you just do, like what just happened, and let’s see what we can do to fix or resolve the issue. So, you may run into some sort of issue with ssl when you’re installing that certificate, or you may run into something that’s got something to do with your content delivery network that may be causing an issue – you might run into something. Well, the thought process is whatever you’re trying to do, just take a step back and, okay, this is what I just tried to do. Let’s see if there’s a plugin or a conflict with what you’re doing.

If it doesn’t resemble any of these other ones that we talked about, and you’ve tried to manually upload it, and you can’t really figure it out, then I would recommend just turning all other plugins off – that’s a good way to troubleshoot – turn to a theme that’s 2017, or a storefront theme, or something that’s very standard and very basic and see what may be causing the issue then. Most of the time, these six, seven reasons are gonna be the reasons why a plugin or a theme cannot be installed, but there could be other reasons that do pop up, and so there’s always gonna be some reason if you’re trying to install a brand-new plugin that you’ve just downloaded or purchased. If you can’t figure out what the error message is, always reach out to the developer. That’s gonna be the best-case scenario and the best place to get support for your plugin.

So, those are the things that I wanna share with you this week, just a little bit more on the troubleshooting front. We’ve kind of talked about password protecting, and removing plugins, and kind of this troubleshooting unique-type settings in the WordPress space in the last couple weeks, and I love diving into this, and I don’t think I’ve ever talked to you about error messages when trying to add a plugin or a theme. And so, that was why I chose the topic for today. So, all the links are in the show notes of course, as always, and you can find out more. And those two bits of code that I talked about in the show as well, you can find those in the show notes as well. That’s all I’ve got for this week. Hopefully, by next week, I’ve got all the wires and everything secure and hidden in my new office, and I’ll be here ready to record another episode for you next week. Until then, take care and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.