Here is the answer I found after trying several things, and the solution does not require you to be a ‘coding’ / programming maestro either.
Jetpack as we know comes in with built-in functionality ranging from Statistics to Spam Control to Sharing to Spell Check and lot more. A very well thought and put together plug-in indeed. But what happens when you get one ‘person’ to do ALL the work? That’s right no matter how smart, it starts getting ‘confused’ when lots of requests start pouring in.
After trying LITERALLY 50 different things I found the Social Media/Sharing feature of Jetpack throws a tantrum whenever we try-out and/or install several Social Media plugins because your code starts getting confused ‘which plugin am I using to share?’ and throws in a hissy fit.
While Jetpack Sharing tool is fantastic, there are some GREAT ones out there such as Social Login, Social Essentials, Floating Social Media, so on and so forth.
What happens is when you install any (or particularly MANY) of these plugins one after another, test and try, Jetpack Sharing tries to retain control of things and in the struggle the ‘Internal Server Error’ happens.
Long story short, if you face this issue do this –
1) Deactivate the ‘sharing’ component of Jetpack, to do this (disabling specific component –
a) click on Learn More button of the feature
b) You’ll see Deactivate or Activate depending on current state
c) Deactivate
d) Test the website functionality, if this solves it, you are good to go. If not go on to step 2.
2) Deactivate one social plug-in at a time and test out your website functionality in a different browser than the one you have dashboard open in (say Chrome for Dashboard & IE for testing website) until you find the plug that is colliding with Jetpack and causing the error.
3) Deactivate this plugin, delete it and re-test everything. Chances are you are likely to have everything working fine & fair.
So no coding involved, no drama – just a little bit patience, logic and testing.
Having said that, Jetpack needs to update it’s code to make it ‘competition friendly’ so if people want to use advanced sharing features offered by some other competitors, they can.
I will also suggest to send the entire technical issue, attempts and outcome to both Jetpack and plugin in question, so both can ‘communicate’ and/or find a resolution in their future updates.
Hope this helps.
“Walking the technical walk in a layman outfit”
Szebastian-One
