Solution Shortcut: If you are working with the wp-ecommerce plugin and you are getting Fatal error: Out of memory errors, you might want to try deactivating your other plugins before you spend to much time on increasing memory in your php.ini configuration files.
That said, here’s the full story.
WordPress is by far one of the most flexible and expandable content management systems I’ve ever worked with. It can be used to build membership sites, affiliate sites, informational business websites, blogging sites, ecommerce sites, you name it.
As of last count there were over eleven thousand plugins available to help turn WordPress into anything you want, and although it has it’s roots in blogging, it has become the platform of choice for all of our projects at Open Source Marketer.
As a result, we have come to appreciate all the hard work and effort that plugin developers put into creating and maintaining the add-on features we love to use.
Sometime though, and by sometime I mean rarely, plugins just don’t play well together and that’s where things can get interesting.
Take our experience with the wp-ecommerce plugin (Version 3.7.6.9). We installed WordPress and a handful of plugins that we like to use on most websites. On the whole wp-ecommerce worked except for the wp-ecommerce sales dashboard wouldn’t display. It kept giving the error message:
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 26738688) (tried to allocate 311296 bytes) in /home/accountnameremoved/public_html/wp-includes/class-simplepie.php on line 4186
I searched the wp-ecommerce forums for possible solutions to Fatal error: Out of memory errors, and found some recommendations to increase the php default memory limit in the php.ini configuration file. After going back and forth with the hosting company and trying 32mb, 64mb, and 128mb settings, I finally got suspicious that there might be a plugin conflict and not a memory allocation problem.
So, I bulk deactivated all the WordPress plugins except the wp-ecommerce shopping cart plugin. Once all the other plugins were deactivated the sales dashboard started working.
I then re-enabled all the plugins so I could again get the same error message. Then I deactivated plugins one by one until I found the problem.
It turns out that the wp-ecommerce plugin conflicts with these plugins:
- CForms 11 – we use this plugin to create contact forms and complex registration forms on other sites
- Redirection – this plugin is good for tracking affiliate links, and offline marketing campaigns
- Admin Menu Editor – this plugin isn’t essential, but it is handy for rearranging the default WordPress menus
- All In One SEO – this plugin does a lot of the heavy lifting for making WordPress sites “SEO Friendly”
That’s very unfortunate because we like using these plugins to add value to the WordPress websites we develop. But, considering the site would be based on the wp-ecommerce plugin, we had no choice but to deactivate the conflicting plugins, for now at least.
Overall, that means that we’ll have to code some features into the WordPress theme and use alternative plugins to accomplish our goals and since we know that lots of people are running into this issue, we wanted to share what we found with you.
Onward and upward,
Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com
This is funny…I just installed the wp e-commerce plugin and got the error. Then I searched the error in google, without saying what for, and this was the first page to come up. I guess they’re watching. :)
Anyway, what happens when you CAN’T deactivate a plugin? Like, when I went *anywhere* in my admin panel I got this error. Now I can log into my admin panel, but I immediately get the error.
I guess I’ll start by increasing my memory allocation, but do you know of a way to uninstall the plugin in the database itself? I can’t think of another way to get in.
-j
Hey Jason, if you have FTP access to your website, you can remove the wp-ecommerce plugin folder from the wp-content/plugins folder and WordPress will automatically deactivate the plugin for you. That’s a default behavior of WordPress. It’s suppose to keep poorly behaving plugins from crashing your website. You don’t have to delete the folder, just move it outside of the wp-content/plugins directory and then go into your admin dashboard. That way if you still need to reactivate the plugin for some reason, you can always put it back into the plugins folder and reactivate it.
Thanks, that completely worked! Which makes me sad, because I really want to keep my Redirection plugin…
-j
Excellent. Depending on where you are in the shopping cart implementation, you might have two options.
1) You could switch to using the Cart66 shopping cart plugin for WordPress, which works wonderfully and is by far THE best WordPress shopping cart plugin I’ve used. In fact, we use it for our sites as well.
2) If you are committed to wp-ecommerce, you could check out the Pretty Link Pro plugin, which provides a lot of the same features as the Redirections plugin, plus a lot of extras. You’ll have to test it with the lite version first though, because I’m not sure if it conflicts with wp-ecommerce. But, it’s worth the time to test it, especially if you have lots of redirects you wan to keep.
Let me know how it turns out.
I´ve installed the plugin and don´t let me do a thing. Deactivating all the plugins, did´t work either. In fact I can´t do anything in my backend even with e-commerce plugin installed, alone. If someone can tell me how to deal with this, I´ll appreciate a lot. Thanks!
The error appears, when I try to activate it is: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 304264 bytes) in /home/elcamino/public_html/elparador/wp-content/plugins/wp-e-commerce/wp-shopping-cart.php on line 156
You might consider trying two things:
1) Increase your allowed php memory on the server. Open your wp-config.php which is located in the root WordPress directory. Then add this line inside the main php tag:
define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);
That will increase your allowed memory usage from the default 32mb to 64mb. ( You can go to 128mb or 256mb for testing. )
2) Try disabling your other plugins and try activating wp-ecommerce by itself. This is more of a general trouble shooting tip, but it might be worth doing to see if you can identify a conflict. If wp-ecommerce works on it’s own, reactive your other plugins one by one until you run into a problem. Then you’ll know where the conflict is.
3) Like I mentioned to Jason, you could switch to using the Cart66 shopping cart plugin for WordPress, which works just works without the headaches of conflicts and coding issues.
Let me know how things turn out for you.
HELP! iCan’t access anything because of this message! I can’t even log into my wp back end without this message showing up! tell me what to do please(step by step)
Jimmy again, Nevermind iFixed it!! :)
Good work Jimmy. What did you do to correct the issue?
Well I went to my host’s site which was http://www.sacredserver.com and there a control panel section under my domain. The control panel shows all types of folders and command functions that my website undergoes. So iDeleted the folder that said e-commerce because that’s the last thing I installed before iHad major problems. and IT Worked! I had help from reading these comments. thanks.
Excellent. I’m glad you got it worked out Jimmy. Keep in mind that WordPress will automatically deactivate a plugin if you remove it from the plugins folder. That’s a great feature of WordPress, especially if you have a plugin conflict of some other plugin issue that’s causing problems with your website. I usually don’t delete the plugin folder. I just move it up a level so that I don’t loose any important files.
Hey guys, I’m looking into the same issue but not within WP e-Commerce, this time it’s affecting my own Plugin; Product Importer Deluxe due to its image import/thumbnail generation.
I thought I’d mention that I’m using WP e-Commerce, cForms, Redirection and All in One SEO Pack on my site and have for years; I’m on a dedicated virtual hosting service with MediaTemple but was previously hosted on shared hosting providers.
Turning off WP e-Commerce isn’t a fix as there’s some code that was chewing through your allocated memory, it’s entirely possible memory usage was already in excess and WP e-Commerce in combination with those other Plugins just pushed that over the edge. Would love to know how many Products were in use on that site prior to migrating to cart66 and whether the same problem kicked up on another e-commerce platform. :)