WordPress MultiSite, Plugins and Activation

WordPress offers for normal Plugins the hook register_activation_hook();. This is active right after the activation of a Plugin, so you can start small installation scripts. But if we are in a MultiSite environment (old: MultiUser) and put the Plugin in the folder wp-content/mu-plugins, then the hook doesn’t do anything, because the Plugin is automatically activated. But there are few ways you can still have a kind of activation hook. One is this option:

if ( ! class_exists( 'my_mu_plugin' ) ) {

    if ( function_exists( 'add_action' ) ) {
        add_action( 'plugins_loaded' ,  array( 'my_mu_plugin', 'get_object' ) );
    }
 
    class my_mu_plugin {

        static private $classobj = NULL;

        public function get_object () {
            if ( NULL === self :: $classobj ) {
                self :: $classobj = new self;
            }
            return self :: $classobj;
        }
 
        public function __construct () {
            // Fake-Activation-Hook
            $this->activation();
        }
 
        private function activation () {
            if ( 'activated' == get_blog_option( 1, 'my_mu_plugin_activated' ) ) {
                // Do Stuff during activation
                ...
 
                // Update Option
                update_blog_option( 1, 'my_mu_plugin_activated', 'activated' );
            }
        }

    }

}

We are doing the following: We check whether a certain option is set in blog 1, if not, then run through an activation function, otherwise do nothing – Blog 1 simple so that the install script is only in blog 1 in use. If you want to use it in all the blogs then simply use the function get_option(). Easy, right?

Guest Post

This post is written by Thomas Herzog – hughwillfayle.de and is a guest post on WP Engineer about WordPress.
Thank you very much from my part to Thomas. Please see his nice plugins on the official WordPress repository.
If you also like to have your interesting post published on our website, please let us know on our contact page. Of course we will appreciate your contribution!


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Comments

One response to “WordPress MultiSite, Plugins and Activation”

  1. Thomas Avatar
    Thomas

    Hi guys,

    Why would I do this instead of placeing it in the wp-content/plugins folder and ask the user to do a network wide activation?