Updates not activating across multisites

Network Activate plugins don’t show on the plugins page for individual sites. They’re hidden.

Right, I understand that. The problem isn’t that they’re not showing up it’s that they don’t seem to be installed on the networked sites. It’s like they don’t exist, even they’re supposedly active across the multisites and working fine on the main site.

You’ll have to be a little more explicit about not showing up, because there are a few possible meanings.

1) You can’t see the plugins page at all on individual sites
2) You CAN see the plugin page, but no plugins are listed
3) You can see the plugin page, non-network activated plugins are listed, but some specific plugins don’t have settings pages on individual sites

If it’s #3, which plugins are you talking about? Some don’t have any settings screens, and some move the settings screens to the Network Dash when on Multisite.

I’ll try to elaborate here:

There are two sites in my network. One I work with on a daily basis (site A), and the other my colleagues maintain (site B), but I am a network admin. I can see the plugin pages for both sites. On the network plugin page and for site A, all of the newly installed plugins appear and are fully functional.

From the plugin page for site B, I do not see these new plugins installed. When I network activate plugins they only activate on site A. It’s as if they’re only installed on site A.

Furthermore, these sites also share the same theme with a different CSS stylesheet. The code updates I made in the theme template are reflected from the network admin end and on the front end for site A, but not on site B.

I’m thinking the problem has to do with the way I installed the updates, which I described above, but I can’t figure where in the process the multisites would be left out. The plugins I’m working with are Co-authors plus 3.0.5, Term Management Tools, 1.1.2, and Export to text 2.4. The theme updates are in index.php and single.php. Thanks for the help.

*scrolls back* Are you really on WP 3.4?

We’ve changed the way the plugins are detected, and it’s very possible that’s what’s going on here.

Hmm. Yes I’m on 3.4.1. When I set up this dev environment to test new changes, upgrading the core caused some compatibility issues. I don’t remember what elements/plugins were compromised but I elected not to update the core because it wasn’t worth it.

If that’s what likely is causing the problem I can try to sort out the update issues. What’s changed in 3.6 as far as the way plugins are recognized?

Between 3.4 and 3.6 there have been a lot of little changes. I have a vague memory of bugs with plugin acitvation on networks that was fixed, but if you really want the details, you can read the changelogs and diffs.

Thanks I think that was the problem. For future reference, it looks like this is controlled by the wp-settings.php file for anyone else out there.