Activate and deactivate two plugins automatically at certain hours

Question

How I can Activate and deactivate two plugins automatically at certain hours?

For example,

I want the "akismet" plugin to be active only from 10am to 7pm and the other Times deactivated.

and

"Yoast Seo" plugin to be active only from 7pm-10am and the other Times deactivated.

Note:

1- akismet and Yoast Seo For example and Not Real.

2- omits the fact that function.php will not run code unless the site is hit. This could cause some potential misses. The other answer here using wp_schedule_event() uses CRON, and does not rely on "outside" forces.

This code is Activate and deactivate on specific days and a plugin

$timestamp = time(); // Timestamp
$day       = date( 'D', $timestamp ); // Get day from timestamp
$active    = array( 'Mon', 'Wed', 'Fri', 'Sat' ); // Days plugin to be active
if ( in_array( $day, $active, true ) ) { // Yoast SEO is active
    activate_plugin( '/wordpress-seo/wp-seo.php' );
} else { // Yoast SEO is deactivated
    deactivate_plugins( '/wordpress-seo/wp-seo.php' );
}

How can I do it? Thanks.

Answer 1

Rather than update the database you could write a mu-plugin to intercept reads from the active_plugins option, e.g.

function option_active_plugins_akismet_or_yoast( $plugins )
{
    if ( !defined('WP_ADMIN') ) {
        $hour = getdate()[ 'hours' ];
        if ( $hour >= 10 && $hour < 19 ) {
            $to_remove = 'wordpress-seo/wp-seo.php';
        } else {
            $to_remove = 'akismet/akismet.php';
        }
        $remove_index = array_search( $to_remove, $plugins );
        if ( $remove_index !== false ) {
            unset( $plugins[ $remove_index ] );
        }
    }
    return $plugins;
}
add_filter( 'option_active_plugins', 'option_active_plugins_akismet_or_yoast' );

This needs to go in a mu-plugin before the plugin load loop. This will leave both active in the admin site and because you're doing this at runtime there won't ever be any overlap when both are active. Unhelpfully there isn't a filter in wp_get_active_and_valid_plugins() to use instead.

I'm assuming these are regular plugins on a regular site and not multisite network-activated plugins. You might need to make the condition ( !defined( 'WP_ADMIN' ) && !wp_doing_ajax() ) too - I haven't thought about that too hard.

However this is a strange thing to do and you should really fix the conflict between your two plugins instead.