Breaking WordPress with a simple plugin

I am prepping for next week’s Workshop for DoOO and WordPress Multisite Admins, and I wanted to create a plugin that could display an error page for the purposes of showing how to troubleshoot a broken WordPress site caused by a problematic plugin. In the past I’ve asked folks to “imagine” a site was broken, but its a little more fun to break stuff for real.

<?php
/**
 * Plugin Name: Really cool neato plugin
 * Description: I am gud programmer.
 * Version: 1.0
 * Author: Taylor Jadin
 */

add_action('wp', 'error_demo');
add_action('admin_init', 'error_demo');

function error_demo() {
    $result = 10 / 0;
}

Ultimately it wasn’t too tricky to figure out. The code above runs on every page and the admin dashboard, and it tries to divide by zero!

From here I just needed to put this code in a file in wp-content/plugins/really-neat/really-neat.php and activate the plugin in WordPress, and we’ve got a broken site 💥!