Jetpack and the Admin Area

So I wanted to install Jetpack but once I activated the plugin I was no longer able to reach the WordPress admin area. My obvious conclusion was that something about the plugin wasn’t agreeing with my server. After a quick once over the logs and finding nothing useful I needed to manually disable the plug-in. This can be done easily by deleting the value from ‘active_plugins’ row in the ‘wp_options’ table in your wordpress database. For most people with managed servers you can use phpMyAdmin to quickly navigate and edit to value. However seeing as I do not have it installed I needed to manually edit my database.

In case you run into the same issue here is how to quickly disable your plugins so that you can bring them up one by one and narrow down your point of failure:

First find the correct row to modify:

SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = 'active_plugins';

Your output should be similar to the following:

a:31:{i:0;s:13:"AddMySite.php";i:1;s:19:"akismet/akismet.php";i:2;s:23:"all_in_one_seo_pack.php";i:3;s:16:"authenticate.php";i:4;s:28:"breadcrumb-navigation-xt.php";i:5;s:18:"codeautoescape.php";}

now we need to clear the value, we can do this with an UPDATE command:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = '' WHERE option_name = 'active_plugins';

Now all your plugins should be disabled and in my case I can now navigate the admin area.