Uninstalling breaks the cloud instance

[momon]

I don't have enough information just yet on this because it just happened and I am waiting on the MODx support team to assist but uninstalling SEOSuite from the manager completely breaks the website (beyond modx because the phpmyadmin url is also giving me 500 error code).

I'll try to update this as I find more info but wanted to bring this to everyone's attention because this shouldn't happen on a production environment. Fortunately we are still just testing things out and are not yet live.

UPDATE: I was able to recover from the error 500 by just clearing out the core/cache folder. That brought me back to the manager while the front end was still giving me 500 error codes. So I installed SEOSuite again and that allowed the frontend to continue working as intended (I probably have some dependencies on my template which require it to be "active" I guess).

In any case, just wanted to leave a relevant note here for anyone experiencing a similar issue that clearing core/cache fixed the errors from the broken uninstall. I'm happy to venture further testing (trying to uninstall again) if anyone is interested in more specific information towards a fix. The plugin should be able to cleanly uninstall IMO.

[gpsietzema]

Thanks @momon

Did you maybe use some of the heading-placeholders?

[momon]

Thanks @momon

Did you maybe use some of the heading-placeholders?

Yes I am, as per your documentation I am using:

<!-- Set by plugin. -->
[[!+ss_meta.meta_title]]
[[!+ss_meta.meta_description]]
[[!+ss_meta.robots]]
[[!+ss_meta.canonical]]
[[!+ss_meta.alternates]]
....

An important update after hearing back from the MODx support team, this isn't the first time they see this issue with the plugin (it has happened before) and to cleanup there are more steps (I just got ahead of myself when I posted).

You also need to disable the plugin manually when this happens because what ends up breaking apparently is the fact that it doesn't cleanly removes itself when you uninstall. The quickest way to disabling is to find out the plugin ID and disabling it via PHPMyAdmin or with an SQL command.

After disabling you then clear cache as I mentioned in the original post. I was also told by support that this can occasionally also lock up the PHP Worker pool and it wont clear itself. If that happens you will need to contact MODx support so they can do this part (at least until they upgrade their infrastructure to allow you to do this yourself from the dashboard).

So the steps above are meant to help anyone getting stuck as I did.

As for the uninstall itself, I am not sure what would be considered best practice, I guess it makes sense that using snippet calls actively and disabling the plugin while using them will introduce issues but I think in practice those snippet calls should just silently fail (or be ignored) if the plugin is not active or the uninstall procedure should yield a warning of potential failure while keeping the calls in the theme and uninstalling the plugin. Effectively it should not cause the website to break and error checking should be in place to avoid it from happening as one can be just disabling the plugin to test something out (which is what I was trying to do). Or maybe plugins just need a way to "activate / deactivate" instead of "uninstall" which would be simpler to control.