Many thanks for your reply Polowigo, it makes perfect sense.

I'm not good with SSH/command lines etc so I logged into phpMyAdmin over the network and ran those commands in the SQL tab as follows:
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON piwigo-db.piwigo-plugins TO 'myusername'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '============';
But I got a syntax error referring to "near 'IDENTIFIED BY '============'.
So I ran it again without the IDENTIFIED BY '============' and didn't get any reported errors this time.

I then ran FLUSH PRIVILEGES; and got no errors:
But sadly everything was the same :-(

After more Googling, I used these commands, but still no joy
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON piwigo_db.* TO 'myusername'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
and even these
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'myusername'@'localhost';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'myusername'@'theIPaddress';
myusername was copied from the local/config/database.inc.php file so should be right.
Mystery eh?

polowigo wrote:

Have you experienced other trouble apart plugins? With installing themes, manage albums?...

No, everything is working well, I've just tested by adding a new theme, adding a new album and uploading photos.
Everything is perfect except plugins.
The whole site has been superb for over 2 years but I did update from 15.6 back in October but can't be sure when this issue started.

So that I understand correctly, the credentials stored in the /local/config/database.inc.php file are used by piwigo to talk to the database and nothing else? There is no need to add a piwigo user of that name, I just have me and I am webmaster.
www-data is used by piwigo to own and access the various folders (I have 777 now, just for testing)

If I back up the database, delete it, and rebuild with the saved .sql file, will it still have all the same permissions and privileges as before? I won't be better off?

On my server Piwigo does not automatically add the plugin to the plugins table in the database when installing through the "add a new plugin" tab. It only does so the first time the activate action is invoked.

Upon reading through the relevant code it appears that when the activate action is processed, and the plugin only appears in the plugins folder and not the plugins table, then Piwigo invokes the install action for that plugin.

This calls the specific plugin's install function and if that produces no errors then it inserts the plugin into the plugins table. Then it calls the plugin's activate function and if that produces no errors then it updates the plugins table to show the plugin is active.

If you are manually updating the plugins table then some plugins might not work when they depend on some action in their install or activate functions. I'm not sure if those functions are called in some other way.

If plugins aren't appearing in the plugins table when you try to activate them then I think that is for some other reason that is happening before Piwigo tries to add the plugin to the table.

Last edited by moberley (2025-12-16 02:55:27)

From the web interface the activation switch makes a request to the Piwigo web service API so I think you might be able to see the errors in the browser.

Before trying to activate a plugin open up the developer tools (should be available as "Inspect" in the menu after right clicking on the plugins page) and open the "Network" tab. After you click the activation switch you should see a request to something like:

/ws.php?method=pwg.plugins.performAction&action=activate&plugin=user_custom_fields&pwg_token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&format=json

And if you select that you should see a response tab that will show you some JSON data coming back from Piwigo. When there are errors you should see some information in that data.

That error appears to be in response to Piwigo's attempt to "INSERT INTO" the plugins table. If that is correct then MySQL is complaining because it is trying to process the INSERT but Piwigo sends only the plugin 'id' and 'version' and, for some reason your MySQL database is expecting to receive a value for 'name'.

The "Field 'name' doesn't have a default value" error means MySQL is trying to add a row without being provided a value for 'name' but 'name' has no DEFAULT set in the table structure so that query fails.

You said you had to rebuild the plugins table using phpMyAdmin so maybe double check the the structure of your plugins table to see if there is a 'name' column? Based on what I have that table should only have the following columns (each with a DEFAULT value):

`id`      varchar(64)               NOT NULL DEFAULT ''
`state`   enum('inactive','active') NOT NULL DEFAULT 'inactive'
`version` varchar(64)               NOT NULL DEFAULT '0'

When I export from phpMyAdmin here is the CREATE TABLE I receive on my server (Piwigo 16.1.0).

CREATE TABLE `piwigo_plugins` (
  `id` varchar(64) CHARACTER SET utf8mb3 COLLATE utf8mb3_bin NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `state` enum('inactive','active') NOT NULL DEFAULT 'inactive',
  `version` varchar(64) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0'
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb3 COLLATE=utf8mb3_uca1400_ai_ci;

Glad to hear your Piwigo is working better.