BuddyPress.org

I manage a company website which includes 2 WordPress blogs – although I did not create them nor do I manage that part of the site. (They are managed by our marketing person who only deals with approving posts and generating content, nothing structural.)

Last week we noticed that one of the blogs came up with a blank page; the last known activity was on about March 10th. WP admin showed it could not find any themes. For some reason, the /wp_content/themes folder was empty – I have no idea how that occurred as this is a managed, secure company site.

Our hosting company has restored the entire folder structure from a backup made on 3/9/2014. I’ve also run a couple of queries on the database which APPEARS (from what little I know) to be intact. After restoring the folder structure, the blog home page is at least visible (header artwork) but nothing much else is shown other than an error:

Fatal error: Class ‘BP_Core_User’ not found in E:\INetPub\wwwroot\expressmetrix\software-audit-forum\wp-content\themes\emforums\sidebar.php on line 47

(which also shows up in the log when I enable debug) … and a “tag-like” looking thing “[bbp-forum-index]” which, I assume, should have been substituted with something.

I did some simple file searching – the wp-content\plugins\buddypress\bp-core folder is there and includes bp-core-classes.php which contains the class definition. As this error is in sidebar.php, presumably an included file in the overall theme, it’s unclear if this alone might be the primary reason the entire site is displaying incorrectly. Given that none of the underlying structure has changed in months (only users and posts added), I’m concerned that somehow someone has figured out a way to damage the site thru a registration or post although I don’t know how something like that would cause a source-code level like problem.

Any suggestions of where/how to look are greatly appreciated.