My company currently has a multisite of about 20 sites, and growing every day. We’re trying to go through the plugins and set standards. IE, forms use plugin X. However, we have not found a single way to go through and systematically show which plugins aren’t even used.
Is there a function that can show us the used, or unused plugins? I have tried searching everything I can think of and cannot for the life of me find an answer.
In short, it cannot be easily determined whether the various plugins you have installed – out of the 23,499 available in the WordPress repo, as of this writing – are currently doing anything.
If a plugin is activated, it is “being used”. Whether or not a given plugin is actually doing anything is an entirely different matter. Since plugins can do a near-infinite number of different things, it would be near-impossible for there to be a way test all past and future plugins to see if they are doing anything.
As an example, say you have a shortcode plugin that you use with
[some_shortcode]
. You could search your posts for that shortcode, and if your search comes up empty, you know it’s not being used. But other plugins do entirely different things, like caching content, adding SEO, enhancing Social-ness in your blog, changing your footer text, etc. How would you create a test to determine if they are “being used”?I think you can use this plugin:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpmu-plugin-stats/screenshots/
This plugin is using
get_plugins()
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_plugins
and fetches
get_option('active_plugins')
for each blog to compare.It uses
switch_to_blog()
on each blog so it might be slower on large multisites, but I think this function got faster after the wordpress 3.5 update, according to