Why are some of the plugins locked ?

Question

I just notice that several of the plugins are locked and will not let me disabale them I cant un check them any ideal what can cause that ?

Comments

That's right, I also wonder why this is the case!!

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Well atleast  iam not the only one having the problem

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Just change Metadata Json

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Do  not understand what you mean?

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Still waiting for a fix to this problem

Answer 1

If you go to the folder of a plugin and take a look at the metadata.json file, you see that some have the option "load_order" "after_db_init". Plugins without this option are always loaded and cannot be disabled. So, if you want to change the behavior you have to set this values in the metadata.json

Comments

As an example, here is the content of metadata.json for the Tag Cloud Widget that is shipped with question2answer (https://github.com/q2a/question2answer/blob/master/qa-plugin/tag-cloud-widget/metadata.json):

{
    "name": "Tag Cloud Widget",
    "description": "Provides a list of tags with size indicating popularity",
    "version": "1.0.1",
    "date": "2011-12-06",
    "author": "Question2Answer",
    "author_uri": "http://www.question2answer.org",
    "license": "GPLv2",
    "min_q2a": "1.4",
    "load_order": "after_db_init"
}

The last option is what is needed to make a plugin checkable.

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Additional note:

Some older plugins do not have a metadata.json file. In those cases, all these information are in the beginning of qa_plugin.php. You can create your own metadata.json file by copying the values from qa_plugin.php to the metadata.json

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Do I have to do that for all the plugins not letting me un check ?

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Alternatively just remove the respective plugins from the plugin directory, if you don't want them loaded in the first place.