Soft Disable All WP Plugins

soft-disable-plugins.php

<?php
/**
 * Plugin Name: Soft disable all WP plugins
 * Author: Evan Mattson (@aaemnnosttv)
 * Description: Allows all plugins to be softly disabled and re-enabled using a single constant.
 * Version: 1.0
 * 
 * Usage: Install this under mu-plugins/, and define('SOFT_DISABLE_PLUGINS', true) to soft disable all plugins.
 *          Delete/comment-out the constant definition or set to false to restore all plugins to their previous active states.
 * 
 * For WordPress 3.0 and above
 */

if ( !defined('SOFT_DISABLE_PLUGINS') )
	define('SOFT_DISABLE_PLUGINS', false);
	
if ( SOFT_DISABLE_PLUGINS )
{
	add_filter('pre_option_active_plugins'          , '__return_empty_array'	, 9999);
	// This next filter prevents the active_plugins setting from being updated (wiped out) while we have them all disabled.
	// update_option will not update an option if the new value === old value.
	add_filter('pre_update_option_active_plugins'	, '__return_empty_array'	, 9999);
}

Hello and thanks for sharing.

One ting puzzles me: would that be a useful plugin to convert an existing single WP site into a multi-site installation? They recommend to close all plugins for that purpose - which is a bummer because of several settings getting lost I guess - but I'm not sure if keeping those settings in the database would ruin the multi-site conversion... Perhaps you have an idea? Cheers.

This code isn't designed to work with multisite, but it could be used for that purpose I suppose. It does not however affect network-enabled plugins for a site already running as a multisite.

Thank you for this, it is much appreciated...