Two of the WordPress plugins I use on this site are Twitter Mentions as Comments and Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin. The first, TMAC, watches Twitter for any tweets that link to a post somewhere on this blog and submits those tweets as new comments on that particular post. GASP's job is to keep spammers from submitting spammy comments by placing a Javascript-driven checkbox in the comment form. A user must check the box to confirm they are not a spambot before submitting their comment.

Both of these plugins are great and work really well on their own.

However, when both plugins are in use and TMAC submits a comment, GASP inspects the comment to see if the checkbox has been marked, finds that it hasn't been, and silently rejects the comment. (Aside: the exception to this is if you are a logged-in user and you initiate a manual TMAC check, any new tweets will successfully pass through GASP).

As a follow-on to my previous post about disabling plugins, this script will enable plugins from the shell.

Lately I've been working with a separate instance of my WordPress site for development and testing of plugins, my theme, etc. I have a helper script that orchestrates the pulling of files and copying of the database from the production server into the dev server. I found that it would be nice to disable certain plugins that I don't want running in the dev instance (ie, plugins that notify search indexes when new posts are made) from within this script.