Hit activate and it took my site down

A recap of what happened. After I was kindly given access to FTP (thank you Tara), I was able to do a little debugging, here are my finds:

The first error I found was the following:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected end of file in /wp-includes/functions.php on line 4994

I think because there were multiple people trying to fix the issue at once, the above file got screwed up somehow. I simply replaced it with a pristine copy of the same version from www.remarpro.com

The second error I found was the following:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class WPAlchemy_MetaBox in /wp-content/themes/delaware/lambda/lambda.meta.box.php on line 54

This one was a bit trickier, let me explain … when the Nooz plugin is activated it also uses a copy of WPAlchemy_MetaBox. Even though the Nooz plugin first does a check to see if the class has already been loaded, in this case the theme “delaware” was not doing a check itself (hence the error points back to one of the theme files).

In either case, this issue helped make the Nooz plugin even more robust, I’ve released version v0.13.0 which will prevents this issue (rare as it may be).

Additionally, I would recommend that anyone who is installing a plugin or theme form the WordPress repository, do a test installation first.

You SHOULD have, at minimum, a staging environment to be able to do a pre-flight. This staging environment SHOULD mirror your production environment.

Even the best, most robust plugin/theme may succumb to an improper mixture of other plugins and themes (software).

As developers we do our best to prevent this, but often, issues beyond our control WILL happen. Hence, it is VERY IMPORTANT to have backups and staging environments/servers to mitigate bad things from happening.