While helping me make some changes to my site Sam2kb pointed out that my site had many errors and gave me the link to http://validator.w3.org/.

My site had about 120 errors. I glanced through and noticed some were saying that a closing tag such as </td> was wrong. I moved on and didn't do anything about them. All the while knowing the only changes I had made to my site were plugins, other than adding a Google search.

After seeing Sam provide the link to another person he was helping today I decided to revisit the validator and see if i could decode what the problems were.

I now had 256 errors and 6 warnings. After seeing that I went and opened my index.php file - it didn't even have some of the lines that the validator listed. So then I opened my page, right clicked, and chose view source. I copied and pasted this into a file that numbered the lines for me. Again, no match. I then noticed there was a "Show Source" checkbox on the validator (below it to the left). This showed me the source it was checking and finding all the errors on. For those that don't realize, it is showing the actual HTML output from all the PHP code which is why it doesn't match elsewhere.

Anyway, I then began to check each error line listed. I found the same thing again and again. The errors were in the plugins I had on the page.

The plugins were:
Content Search Form (which was built right into the skin I used)
Social Bookmarks (which I believe I downloaded from the plugins area here)
and
Democracy Poll (I don't remember if I got that here or somewhere else)

I removed those three plugins, and revalidated. I now have just 8 errors.

Granted I have no idea why they are errors, or how to fix them, but it is still just 8 of them now. The remaining errors all have the < or > of a tag highlighted.

I just wanted to share this information with everyone so people don't get extremely panicked that all the work they have put into their site has done nothing more then cause errors on the page. If you do have errors I suggest you investigate a bit to see whats causing them before jumping to, "well I messed up my site pretty quick and easily."

Now to see if we can fix these plugins.

Also, thanks again to Sam for all his help along the way.

Gene :-)