How Does WordPress Know Which Plugins Are Active?

Hi all,

I’m sure there has to be documentation on this, but I can’t find it. Maybe I’m not phrasing my question or problem correctly.

So I’m working on a site that contains two instances of WordPress – one main one at the root directory, and another in a separate directory on the main domain (not a subdomain).

I have to update these sites, and our hosting environment doesn’t have easy staging environments, nor the ability to easily upload import a database that’s even close to the size of ours and this can’t be changed at the moment.

Besides moving somewhere that makes this easier or relying on a plugin to handle this (which I don’t necessarily want to do but have been looking into – I’ve pitched us moving to new hosting), my first thought was “ok, the databases are essentially going to stay the same, can I just do the updates, and then restore the files via ftp over top of what’s there? That probably won’t cause too much downtime, since most of the files should be the same.”

My question here is: if I restore the files on top of what’s there, the previous plugins that were used are still going to be uploaded. My assumption is that I’d actually have to update the database because I think that’s where the info would be on what plugins are currently active. Also, obviously, it’s very possible that some plugins create database entries and those will need to be updated as well.

How does WordPress know which plugins my site is using opposed to ones that have just been uploaded to the server?

Is there something totally wrong with the way I’m thinking about this?

Is there a better way to handle this update so that I can break down updating it bit by bit instead of trying to (and not being able to) import two databases over top what’s there via PHPmyAdmin that results in little to no downtime – maybe while still using PHPMyAdmin?

Thanks in advance.

• This topic was modified 2 years, 12 months ago by nathandonnelly.