WordPress 5 Cookbook

How it works...

We can activate/deactivate available plugins from the Plugins list in the dashboard. The active plugins are stored in the active_plugins option in the wp_options database table. Consider the following active_plugins option value:

a:4:{i:0;s:19:"akismet/akismet.php";i:1;s:31:"code-snippets/code-snippets.php";i:2;s:36:"contact-form-7/wp-contact-form-7.php";i:3;s:49:"wpcookbookchapter3/wpcookbookchapter3.php";}

As you can see, all the active plugins are stored in a serialized value with the plugin folder name and main plugin file name. Let's take a look at how the two techniques work with this value:

• Changing folder name: Once we rename the plugin folder, the stored path in the active_plugins value doesn't match the actual path ...