jimgroom

Image Credit: Alan(ator)’s “Solar System Disco Ball Mobile”

That’s right, UMW Blogs now has all the BuddyPress features fully operational, take a look for yourself at the blogs directory, members directory, groups directory and profiles. This is very eciting for a wide range of reasons, and we couldn’t have done it without the great, potentate D’Arcy “Bike Pants” Norman, particularly his post here which illustrates how to get BuddyPress working with the Multi-DB setup—which had been holding us up for a couple of weeks now. Now, I’m sure this issue will be updated in the forthcoming version of Multi-DB, but this fix allows us to push ahead with our development plans for BuddyPress on a much quicker timeline. So, once again the folks in the edtech network prove to be invaluable in the clutch. I’d share a foxhole with D’Arcy, and I just might at OpenEd

OK, but for documenting purposes I am going to explain the issues I had with getting this working—which should illustrate my ignorance clearly. In the Multi-DB environment he BuddyPress tables where actually installed in a database other than the Global DB, which is where they belong, but I had no idea where. Well once I searched them out I finally found them in database d (which is one of 18 possible databases) and followed D’Arcy’s directions from there and everything went smoothly.

Now, once I set everything up it worked like charm except for the blogs directory which was throwing this error:

Fatal error: Unsupported operand types in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core.php on line 985

We thought it might be linked to plugins or themes, but it is probably related to older blogs problem “that don’t have a ‘last_updated’ blogmeta entry” according to Andy Peatling—whose word I trust So, I submitted a bug report, and I imagine this will only effect blog communities that have been established for a while and have a number of blogs that haven;t been updated for a while. So, in the meantime, Martha had the idea to go into the bp-themes/bpmember/directories/blogs/blogs-loop.php and bp-themes/bpmember/directories/blog/index.php and comment out the line of code calling for last_updated around line 21 of blogs-loop.php and roughly on line 79 of the index.php file in the same directory, if not just look for the line of code with this call bp_the_site_blog_last_active()

OK, now to hack and integrate BuddyPress into UMW Blogs like it was my job!

Filed under: , BuddyPress, Development, UMW Blogs, database, fix, multi-db, umwblogs, wordpress multi-user, wpmu, wpmu development | No Comments »

I saw this on Youtube.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

bbPress is finally moving towards 1.0, and it looks like it may get there quickly. The tutorial that I wrote up about integrating WPMU, BuddyPress, and bbPress was actually for bbPress Alpha, so I took the time to update today. The cookie integration details changed slightly for me for WPMu 2.7.1, so I figured I would update the tutorial. Particularly because it has gotten almost 10,000 views in six months, something that reminds me that people read the bava for WPMu How-Tos far more than my navel gazing film and theory posts—though I would argue the latter are far superior

Anyway, below is a link to the updated tutorial, if you are still working with the Alpha I recommend you update because RC3 seems pretty stable and the cookie integration is almost there, which will make this tutorial obsolete so very soon.

Link to tutorial for Integrating WPMu, BuddyPress, and bbPress updated for bbPress 1.0-rc3

Filed under: , BuddyPress, bbPress, wordpress multi-user, wpmu, wpmu development | No Comments »

With over 7 million users on WordPress.com, chances are that a number of faculty and students are bound to be familiar with the application at your campus. Case in point, a faculty member new to blogging at UMW just came in for a consultation, and while she was new to UMW Blogs and hasn’t used blogs for her classes before, she does blog on her own and is using—that’s right, you guessed it!—WordPress. So, my job was easy, all I had to do is explain and show her the plugins we use to make syndication hum, pointing out some advantages of using these re-publishing tools for tracking her students’ work all from one course blog. Man, the dividends are really starting to pay off with this stuff, and it truly does change the support model.

Filed under: , UMW Blogs, Wordpress, umwblogs, wpmu, wpmu development, wpmued | No Comments »

Update: The following error was caused by wp-cache.php. I disabled the file and WP-Super-Cache for the moment, and we’ll see if an upgrade of WP-Super-Cache doesn’t solve this error.

Every user that is not an admin on UMW Blogs seemed to be getting the following error in the header of the administrative backend:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-admin/includes/template.php on line 3169

It was highly annoying for me because I didn’t know how to fix it. But thanks to my main man Zach Davis, it is now fixed hidden by adding the following line of code after line 3169 in the wp-admin/includes/template.php, still working on a fix:

if(!is_array($actions)) $actions = array();

The other error I ran into today was related to a PHP allowed memory size within the adminstrative backend of the http://tags.umwblogs.org site (which is the place where every post in UMW Blogs is being republished using Donncha’s Sitewide Tags Pages plugin). Specifically, whenever I hit quickedit on a post in the backend, I would get this error where the categories and other metadata would show up, and when I clicked edit, the post text data would not show up at all.

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 524286 bytes) in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-admin/includes/template.php on line 419

The blog is huge, with thousands and thousands of posts, and I have a sneaking suspicion it is bursting at the seams. We have to find another way to archive and store this stuff once it reaches over 20 or 30,000 posts In the mean time we upped the memory quota, but this is a shot-term fix— I think a long term solution might be something we may have to think through. Anyone have any ideas?

Filed under: , bugs, wordpress multi-user, wpmu, wpmu development, wpmued | No Comments »

Image credit: Steve Rhodes’ “Bank of America security giving me the finger during the Iraq war protest”

OK, I need some help here. I am trying to make sure everything we do on UMW Blogs is covered under SSL, and while we have the SSL certificate for UMW Blogs, we don’t have the dynamic subdomain certificate. So, in short, is there some http, .htaccess voodoo we can do that would force everyone to sign-in through the main umwblogs.org domain, which would then kick them back to the administrative backend of their own blog once they’re in? I imagine this might even work for mapped domains, and it seems similar to what wordpress.com is doing. Any hints or tips would be greatly appreciated, because I have to get this solved right quick

Filed under: , umwblogs, wordpress multi-user, wpmu, wpmu development, wpmued | No Comments »

Image credit: gem66’s “Farm Tractor and Family”

The recent annoucnement and sharing of the various extensions and code that enables user integration between WPMu and MediaWiki, I have once again returned to the idea of make the UMW Blogs Wiki a MediaWiki farm. The blog needs a new theme, I know, but more importantly, we need to be able to propagate new wiki installs for any faculty or student who may want to experiment more with this application.  We have slowed down the development around MediaWiki for a number of reasons: the absence of a WYSIWYG editor, spam hordes, and growing belief that anything you can do in a wiki you can do in a blog better—-which is an idea I continually flirt with, even though the applications are radically different in conception and design and I am most likely blinded by my WordPress habit. I’m also of the opinion that the wiki is best used by a very few people or many, many people, the middle-space seems to be where wikis go to die, but once again this is more a feeling than a theory.

With all that said, I know the wiki isn’t dead. And the integration of MediaWiki and WPMu at UMW Blogs may be the first step along the route of my rehabilitation. I installed the extensions and got the integration up and running without a hitch, save the re-direct issue back to the article after signing in from MediaWiki—an issue that is being worked on currently. The realization of integration has prompted me to experiment more with wiki farms which I am committing to this Summer (and may actually happen give n that Joss Winn is also interested, and he actually knows what he is doing), but in the interim, here are a couple of extra quick hacks that allowed me to shut down editing for un-authenticated users (read spam control), as well as preventing anyone from creating a new account through the MediaWiki install, mainly because all registrations are now handled through WPMu.

And when I say simple hacks I mean simple hacks:

To prevent editing by un-authenticated users add this line to the LocalSettings.php file:

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;

To prevent users from creating  accounts on the MediaWiki install add this line to the LocalSettings.php file:

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

That’s it, it ain’t much, I know, but now whenever anyone logs into UMW Blogs, they can simply head over the UMW Wiki and have full editing rights.  Now, if we could just allow anyone within the UMW Blogs community to quickly and easily create their own wiki within this wiki….that’s the real trick and hopefully I’ll have something to blog about as I experiment more and more with this possibility.

Filed under: , Development, Hack, Joss Winn, UMW Blogs, design, hacks, integration, mediawiki, wpmu, wpmu development, wpmued | No Comments »

“Nothing to see here, folks, nothing to see. Move along now….move along.”

We waited until the end of the semester for the UMW Blogs upgrade to 2.7.1 and I have to say going from version 2.6.5 to 2.7.1 was the easiest yet. I was a bit concerned given this was our first upgrade with the multi-database setup, but not a cough in a car load so far. Everything went smooth, and we even got the lion’s share of the support documentation for 2.7.1 ready to go. You can see it here, and if you are using the Wiki INC plugin (where did the download file go, Scott?) you can grab in from the UMW Wiki source here. Next step is to flesh some of the areas out in greater detail and then get going on some screencasts with my man Andy Rush.

We are intentionally making this documentation less UMW Blogs specific—although it is hard to erase the trace entirely—so feel free to take what you need at will, and keep in mind that the documentation for the older versions will not go away, nor will the URLs change.

Filed under: , 2.7, Andy Rush, UMW Blogs, documentation, screencast, screencasts, umwblogs, upgrade, wiki, wpmu, wpmu development | No Comments »

I missed this announcement last Thursday while traveling and getting ready for CUNY WordCampEd, but this is pretty exciting news from the CUNY Academic Commons, which promises to become a force in offering up much needed plugins and open source tool integration for open source applications like WPMu, MediaWiki, and the like.

Very cool, MediaWiki and WPMu integration has been the bane of my existence for a while now, and I’ve tested this puppy out on UMW Blogs and it works seamlessly on WPMu 2.6.5+ and MediaWiki versions 1.12.x+. We just need to figure out how to re-direct users who login directly from MediaWiki back to the wiki article they want to edit, and voila!

The CUNY Academic Commons, in partnership with Cast Iron Coding, is proud to announce a collection of MediaWiki extensions that will create a single sign-on system between WordPress Multi-User and MediaWiki.

With this extension, administrators of WordPress Multi-User will be able to add robust wiki functionality to their websites without forcing users to create separate accounts. Now, users will be able to sign in once to the home page of the system and have that sign-in carried over to the wiki.

We’re running this setup currently on the CUNY Academic Commons, a site that was conceived of as an open-source academic social network in which the members of the 23-campus City University of New York system would be able to connect with one another, share resources, and create new communities of interest. The site is built on the following platforms, which can now all be accessed via a single log-in: WordPress Multi-User + BuddyPress + BbPress + MediaWiki.

This integration builds on the fine work of Ciaran Gultnieks, the author of AuthWP, Daniel Kinzler, the author of LockDown, and Marcel Minke, the author RedirectAfterLogout.

We are delighted to release this extension under a GNU General Public License. Full documentation and files can be found here.

Go, CUNY, go!

Filed under: , 14873, 17915, BuddyPress, Wordpress, bbPress, cuny, integration, mediawiki, open, open source, plugins, single sign-on, wordpress multi-user, wpmu, wpmu development | No Comments »

I missed this announcement last Thursday while traveling and getting ready for CUNY WordCampEd, but this is pretty exciting news from the CUNY Academic Commons, which promises to become a force in offering up much needed plugins and open source tool integration for open source applications like WPMu, MediaWiki, and the like.

Very cool, MediaWiki and WPMu integration has been the bane of my existence for a while now, and I’ve tested this puppy out on UMW Blogs and it works seamlessly on WPMu 2.6.5+ and MediaWiki versions 1.12.x+. We just need to figure out how to re-direct users who login directly from MediaWiki back to the wiki article they want to edit, and voila!

The CUNY Academic Commons, in partnership with Cast Iron Coding, is proud to announce a collection of MediaWiki extensions that will create a single sign-on system between WordPress Multi-User and MediaWiki.

With this extension, administrators of WordPress Multi-User will be able to add robust wiki functionality to their websites without forcing users to create separate accounts. Now, users will be able to sign in once to the home page of the system and have that sign-in carried over to the wiki.

We’re running this setup currently on the CUNY Academic Commons, a site that was conceived of as an open-source academic social network in which the members of the 23-campus City University of New York system would be able to connect with one another, share resources, and create new communities of interest. The site is built on the following platforms, which can now all be accessed via a single log-in: WordPress Multi-User + BuddyPress + BbPress + MediaWiki.

This integration builds on the fine work of Ciaran Gultnieks, the author of AuthWP, Daniel Kinzler, the author of LockDown, and Marcel Minke, the author RedirectAfterLogout.

We are delighted to release this extension under a GNU General Public License. Full documentation and files can be found here.

Go, CUNY, go!

Filed under: , BuddyPress, CUNY WordCampEd, Wordpress, bbPress, cuny, integration, media, mediawiki, open, open source, plugins, single sign-on, wordpress multi-user, wpmu, wpmu development, wpmued | No Comments »