Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

Once upon a time, I whipped up a Reactivate All Plugins feature for WordPress, to compliment the Deactivate All Plugins action (which is recommended before an upgrade). Unfortunately, the patch didn’t make it into the WordPress 2.2 release. And I forgot to nudge anybody about it for the 2.3 release until it was too late. But, the plugin reactivation patch is slated for inclusion in the 2.5 release, due in March (BTW, you did know that version 2.4 is being skipped, right?).

That said, you might notice that I added a note on the feature request ticket. There has always been some disagreement about the semantics of calling it “Reactivate All Plugins”, because you aren’t reactivating “all” plugins, just the ones that you deactivated previously with the “Deactivate All Plugins” button. I pointed out that it might be better to use a term more like the Windows “Safe Mode” terminology. This feature serves a similar purpose, after all. Maybe “Safe Mode” and “Enhanced Mode”? It might also be good if we added a note on the admin screens along the lines of, “This site is currently in Safe Mode. To reactivate your previous set of plugins, visit the Plugins page and click the Enhanced Mode button.”

Does anyone have other suggestions on better wording for the buttons? It needs to be something short (since it’s on a button), clearly understood, and a concept that is easily translated to other languages. How would you rename the “Deactivate All Plugins” and “Reactivate All Plugins” buttons?