Similar issue on a number of sites.
The plugin classic-editor/classic-editor.php
has been deactivated due to an error: Plugin file does not exist.
Plugins page
Deleting via ftp and reinstalling in the backend seemed to fix.
Or https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-gutenberg/ appears to be a workaround.
Need to know the cause and if there’s a vulnerability here.
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This reply was modified 9 months, 2 weeks ago by
stevenjc.
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This reply was modified 9 months, 2 weeks ago by
stevenjc.
Having a look into something related I think – WordFence reports a file difference, but shows “Unable to read file contents” when I try to view the differences. The file exists on our server, but I assume it’s trying to locate the canonical file, which may be missing for the same reason.
Not sure if this is related, but we have v1.6.3 installed, dating back to March 30th 2023. The latest repo version indicates readme.txt has been updated to increase Tested Up To to 6.5, but no obvious changes to classic-editor.php. There’s no corresponding version tag update for the change to readme.txt, but I’m not sure how plugin updates work.
Will keep an eye on this thread.
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This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by
exmosis. Reason: Hit enter too soon
I found the classic-editor.php file missing
This sounds troublesome. I can confirm that there have been no updates/changes to the plugin for quite some time. It works as expected in newer WP versions so only the readme.txt was updated to indicate that.
Frankly I’m unsure about what may be deleting a specific plugin file but not the whole plugin directory. It is possible that this is caused by another plugin. @spaceling @exmosis @stevenjc could you post a list of your active plugins here if possible so we can look at what the plugins that all of you are using are doing? Also, if you’re maintaining several sites, perhaps look at the common plugins. Would be great if we can figure this out π
Thread Starter
Aharon
(@spaceling)
@azaozz Here are the recently updated plugin directories (updated prior to classic-editor.php disappearing):
Updated Wednesday, 1 May 12:55am
wordpress-seo (a/k/a Yoast SEO)
Updated Tuesday, 30 April 6:26pm
updraftplus
Updated Monday, 29 April 6:37pm
schema-and-structured-data-for-wp
atec-cache-info
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This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by
Aharon. Reason: removed inactive plugins that had been updated
Thanks @azaozz, really appreciated. It’s a weird one.
In my case same deal: the classic-editor
plugin directory remained but the classic-editor.php
file was missing, across eight different sites.
Common plugins on those sites
Advanced Custom Fields
Collapse-O-Matic
MonsterInsights
Gravity Forms
Members
Wordfence
Yoast SEO
We had a similar mysterious “plugin disappears” case just recently. Files inside directory would disappear exactly the same time every week, which, on surface, pointed to a cron job-like probability.
It turned out to be WP’s automatic rollback feature from https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/07/11/new-in-6-3-rollback-for-failed-manual-plugin-and-theme-updates/
Plugin had a copy made in wp-content/upgrade-temp-backup/
and as long as this directory had an entry, WP cron job would try to restore it once a week, every week.
There were some extra parameters on why this rollback couldn’t be successful (symlinked from PHP deployer source directory elsewhere, etc), but it was a crazy couple of months tracing this one down.
ChatGPT suggested using auditctl -l -w /home/wordpress/deploy/plugins/stream/current/ -p wa -k deletion_watch
to trace down deletion reasons, and say what you will about AI assistance, I would not have thought of this myself.
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This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by
lkraav.
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This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by
lkraav.
Good info @lkraav, thanks.
@azaozz this leads me to speculate about what may have happened, in my case at least. We’d recently migrated the affected sites to a server running LiteSpeed and I believe this was messing with wp-cron.php and hence plugin auto updates which could well be the culprit here.
Agh, have found out more – scratch that previous response.
More likely in our case it was the malware scanner on our server reporting false positives.
I’ve had a similar issue with a second plugin on the same site, which seems to be caused by the tag being removed from the source – see https://wordpress.org/support/topic/version-3-2-1-missing/
We’re running Wordfence for security, which apparently takes a copy of plugins for running against integrity checks and I wonder if versioning issues are causing problems here.
I’m trying to compare readme.txt between our site, plugin downloads, and the plugin info screen, but it’s a bit confusing:
readme.txt on our site:
- Tested up to: 6.2
- Stable tag: 1.6.3
readme.txt downloading 1.6.3 package from the plugin page:
- Tested up to: 6.2
- Stable tag: 1.6.3
readme.txt downloading dev version from the plugin page:
- Tested up to: 6.5
- Stable tag: 1.6.3
I’m not familiar with how plugin versions work under the hood though. Would updating the tag version help Wordfence see the expected change? Wordfence notes that “If you install that new version and run a scan then you may get a scan result that a file or files have been modified because our mirror copy of the plugin for that same version number differs due to the changes the plugin author made without committing a new tag version number.“
@stevenjc What do you see in your readme.txt now that you’ve reinstalled the plugin, out of interest?
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This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by
exmosis. Reason: Added Wordfence link and info for reference
@exmosis
Tested up to: 6.2
Stable tag: 1.6.3
If you’re seeing this in another plugin as well it may well be something else that’s causing the issue. As mentioned previously the culprit in our case was our server-level malware scanner.