Having a hard time with StatPress plugin for WordPress

Of course that after a while I disabled the plugin without knowing what actually happened in my database. I don’t remember if the plugin had some kind of option to do a less “aggressive” logging or not but the truth is that wp_statpress table generated by the plugin had about 5 Mb (which is definitely not good). Nevertheless the blog was OK; the plugin had been disabled, everything was back to normal; or at least that’s what I thought. A couple of days ago I had to move my hosting to another company. Did a full MySQL backup and one for the home folder. It is important to know that the database backup was created using PhpMyAdmin tool (Export, Save as file, nothing fancy). The whole SQL file was about 7 Mb in size. OK so I had a problem as the maximum limit of an uploaded file on the new host was something like this: “(Max: 102 kKiB)” (yes, I know… what kind of hosting is that ? but it’s better than nothing and no, that’s not a typo, that’s the way it shows up in PhpMyAdmin.

So there was no way I could upload the file that way. I decided to start my Wamp server and to upload the SQL file in a temporary database. After a while PhpMyAdmin timed out. I opened up Navicat and saw that 23 tables were processed. Guess which was the last one ? Yep, it was wp_statpress. I browsed the table and saw exactly 1000 entities. Lots and lots of statistical information. I decided to take a look inside the SQL backup file. I searched for the name of the table and guess what ? There were more than 15.000 lines to be processed. Each line was an actual entity which contained all the imaginable and unimaginable information regarding the visitors of my blog. I don’t remember if the plugin had or not (at least the version I used back then) some kind of option that would have let you clean the logged information from the database whenever you want or from time to time. I didn’t use the plugin more than 2 or 3 days and my blog didn’t receive great amounts of visitors. Imagine what would happen on a large scale blog. Seeing this I sat and thought… “gosh, when I will write a public plugin for WordPress it will have some tables in the database I will make sure to have an option saying something like: “Are you sure you want to wipe out all the settings and data stored so far by this plugin plugin as answers: “No, I’m sure I will be using this again.” and “Yes, get me clean !” just to make sure the user will always have a clean database”. It would be nice to have this implemented in the actual core of WordPress.

Anyway I started by deleting all that was related to wp_statpress first place). Everything went smoothly. I then adjusted the wp-config.php file but something was still not working. The database connection was being established but I was getting this warning:

Warning: array_keys() [function.array-keys]: The first argument should be an array in path\wp-includes\widgets.php on line 686

Only then I remembered that because I was in a rush when I created the database backup I forgot to disable all my plugins and widgets (you might want to check this page out before upgrading WordPress). I couldn’t get into the admin interface, my blog wasn’t showing up so I googled for that error and found a cure. I added the following lines in my theme’s functions.php file:

delete_option('widget_text');
delete_option('widget_rss');

Then I cleared my browser’s cache, refreshed the pages a couple of times and everything was back online again. Then I removed the above lines from my file. I was home free :)

I also had some problems with the user permissions on the MySQL databases on the new server so the “Data Transfer” Wizard from Navicat helped here as well.

I hope this story will be of use to someone one day.