Plugin error crashes entire site

Hi there,

This is a first for me. I’m not looking for plugin support, but I would love a little WordPress knowledge edification. I’ve been doing this for years, but maybe there’s something about WP’s architecture that I’ve missed.

Any idea why one error in a plugin file would cause an entire WordPress site to go down? This happened on a plugin that was only being called by one page, but the error brought everything down — including the ability to use WP-Admin.

I had a parse error appear in the plugin file — not a core WordPress file. Something along the lines of unexpected T_FUNCTION. The error was on line 420.

When I found the error (an errant ” mark), I uploaded a fixed version to the server with identical permissions. Then all of a sudden, there was a T_FUNCTION error on line 1 — no luck finding this error. After installing a clean version of the file, the error persisted.

Only after removing two of the plugin’s core files did everything return to normal. I’m in a holding pattern now, figuring out how to remove the plugin and its tables while saving some styling work I did in the plugin’s WP-Admin User Interface (not the PHP files themselves). I need to remove the plugin without causing any other issues for the site.

Thanks much!