Unban GoDaddy / MediaTemple WordPress Plugins

GoDaddy managed WordPress hosting, and by ownership MediaTemple as well, prevents some plugins from being activated on website. Some of these may make some sense if the conflict with caching, etc, but I feel like including a list is good enough and if you want to install that plugin on the website you’re paying for, so be it. There are several plugins that are banned in the list that I regularly use in my website development, for example Gravity Forms.

If you try to enable this plugin on a site hosted on GoDaddy or MediaTemple rather than activating, you get an error that says:

Not Available: This plugin is not allowed on our system due to performance, security, or compatibility concerns. Please contact our support with any questions.

There is a Must-Use Plugin called gd-system-plugin that includes a class called GD_System_Plugin_Blacklist. This class hooks into the plugin installer code to hide links, show errors, and otherwise prevent some plugins from being installed and activated. The way that it does this is by calling the GD_System_Plugin_Blacklist->get_blacklist() method. This method tries to get a value for get_site_transient( 'gd_system_blacklist' ) and if it’s empty, then fetches the list from a URL and caches it.

Luckily there is a filter for pre_site_transient_* so you can short circuit the whole thing.

Unban GoDaddy Plugin Code

We can’t just return an empty array here, because there is a check for empty(), but we can return our own “list” of banned plugins instead of fetching it from a URL (or even the transient cache if it was already set). Plugin code is below, but the filter could just as easily be added to another plugin, functions.php in your theme, or another mu-plugin.

/*
Plugin Name: Unban Goddady/MediaTemple Plugins
Description: Allow plugins banned by GoDaddy to be used on your site
*/
add_filter( 'pre_site_transient_gd_system_blacklist', function(){
    return array( array( 'name'=>'godaddy', 'minVersion'=>0, 'maxVersion'=>1 ) );
} );

List of Plugins Banned on GoDaddy and MediaTemple

This is the list of plugins banned by GoDaddy as of the writing of this post.

6scan-backup
6scan-protection
adminer
adsense-click-fraud-monitoring
all-in-one-seo-pack
all-in-one-wp-migration
aspose-cloud-ebook-generator
aspose-doc-exporter
backupwordpress
backwpup
broken-link-checker
contextual-related-posts
custom-contact-forms
easy-coming-soon
ezpz-one-click-backup
fancybox-for-wordpress
favicon-by-realfavicongenerator
fuzzy-seo-booster
google-analytics-for-wordpress
google-sitemap-generator
google-xml-sitemaps-with-multisite-support
gravityforms
inboundio-marketing
iwp-client
jr-referrer
leads
liveforms
miwoftp
mp3-jplayer
newsletter
nextgen-gallery
pagelines
photo-gallery
php-event-calendar
platform
pluscaptcha
pods
portable-phpmyadmin
ptengine-real-time-web-analytics-and-heatmap
quick-cache
referrer-wp
schram-kljsdfjkl
seo-alrp
sgcachepress
similar-posts
statpress
synthesis
tdwordcount
the-codetree-backup
toolspack
ultimate-member
updraft
w3-total-cache
wordpress-beta-tester
wordpress-gzip-compression
wordpress-popular-posts
wordpress-seo
work-the-flow-file-upload
wp-all-import
wp-business-intelligence-lite
wp-cache
wp-cachecom
wp-copysafe-pdf
wp-copysafe-web
wp-engine-snapshot
wp-fast-cache
wp-fastest-cache
wp-file-cache
wp-phpmyadmin
wp-postviews
wp-power-stats
wp-slimstat
wp-super-cache
wp-ultimate-csv-importer
wpengine-common
wponlinebackup
wptouch
wysija-newsletters
yet-another-featured-posts-plugin
yet-another-related-posts-plugin