Allowing WordPress Themes To Handle Deactivated or Missing Plugins

The plugins are one of the greatest reasons to use WordPress.  The plugin creators have something for everything.  A lot of plugins work quietly in the background without needing any changes in your template.  Others let you easily do neat things within the actual content of your posts.

Those plugins require a little special care. If the plugin is deactivated, they can cause the page to display errors instead of the content you are expecting.

There is an fairly easy way to handle these. In the section where you add the php code to call the function, you can wrap it with another php code that checks to see if the function exists before calling the function.

For example, to check for the Related Posts function, you can use something similar to this code:

<?php if ( function_exists(‘related_posts’) ) : ?>
<h2>Related posts</h2>
<?php related_posts(); ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>

Then if the plugin is deactivated or deleted or something similarly horrible happened and WordPress can’t find the code it is trying to run, it will just skip the entire block of code. You will not have any errors on the page.

The only word of warning is that since there is no error displayed to the readers, there will be no error displayed to you either so pay attention to make sure everything looks the way you want it to whenever you make changes.