System task: Plugin conflict detection #497
Description
Context
Plugin conflicts are one of the hardest structural issues to diagnose on WordPress. They cause white screens, broken functionality, and performance degradation — and site owners often don't know which plugin is the culprit. DM has WP-CLI access and runs inside WordPress, making it uniquely positioned to automate the classic "deactivate one at a time" debugging workflow.
Proposed
wp datamachine plugins diagnose — detect plugin conflicts:
- Check for PHP errors/warnings in the error log associated with specific plugins
- Detect plugins that hook into the same filters/actions in potentially conflicting ways
- Identify plugins that enqueue duplicate/competing assets (e.g. two plugins loading their own copy of Select2)
- Check for known incompatible plugin pairs (could maintain a lightweight registry)
- Measure per-plugin impact on page load time (activate/deactivate + benchmark)
The activate/deactivate benchmark approach is the nuclear option and should be opt-in with --benchmark flag since it briefly disrupts the site.
Why
This is the hardest item on the list because conflicts are emergent — they depend on the combination of plugins, not individual plugins. But even partial detection (duplicate assets, shared hooks, error log correlation) is more than most site owners have today.