Plugin Toggle Turns WordPress Admin Bar Into Shortcut To Enable/Disable Plugins

Developed by Brady Vercher and Gary Jones, Plugin Toggle adds the ability to disable or enable plugins from the WordPress admin bar. This simple plugin is awesome, especially when it comes to diagnosing problems. One of the tenents of troubleshooting WordPress is to disable every plugin and re-enable them one by one in a process of elimination.

Generally, this is accomplished by having the plugin management page in one browser tab with the front end of the website in another. When a plugin is deactivated, switch browser tabs and refresh to see if the problem disappears. Depending on the speed of your site and the number of plugins installed, this can be a cumbersome experience.

Plugin Toggle In Action

Activated plugins have a brighter shade of text while disabled plugins are grayed out. To switch between on or off, click on the plugin name. The page you’re on will automatically refresh saving you a step in the troubleshooting process. While I used WordPress troubleshooting as an example of what Plugin Toggle is capable of, it’s great to use by itself as a shortcut to turn plugins on and off without having to navigate the WordPress back end. It’s also an interesting use of the WordPress admin bar.

If you’re interesting in trying out the plugin yourself, you can download it from the WordPress.org plugin repository.