[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 17 years, 4 months ago]

I see I’m not the only one thinking in this direction. Basically a uniform default pre-widgeted blog layout for new users to use, that matches the existing site, creating a “facebook” like experience for lack of a better term, where everything fits nicely in its box.

I think the next step would be once you’ve got that done, to remove the “Appearance” area from the user admin entirely, that way they don’t go breaking it, or seeing a menu that they can’t use.

I’ve thought about making a default theme that wasn’t widgetized, with a hard coded sidebar.php; that would work, but it’s more of a work-around than a resolution.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 17 years, 4 months ago]

So the above little blog to news function doesn’t work for me.

I’m not using the trunk, just the most recent beta. Could that be the problem?

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 17 years, 4 months ago]

That’s the response I anticipated getting, but it doesn’t answer the questions.

Unless I’m missing something, and I definitely could be, doing that alone makes the default theme set and still allows for editing of widgets. I would like a pre-made widgetized blog setup so that my users can’t/won’t have to do it themselves.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 17 years, 4 months ago]

Does Milwaukee know this?

Hmm… I suppose not…

But then again, how many people can you say made it out of the Midwest alive?

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 17 years, 4 months ago]

I will go out on a limb to say that what looks like a bug at first is often times just normal user error.

I consider myself a seasoned PHP/SQL/Linux/WordPress/bbPress veteran, and to be honest it took me installing and reinstalling MU/BuddyPress 4 times before I was able to follow the instructions correctly. Each time I would have sworn on my undead mothers grave that I did everything right, but alas…

So a tip to you all, if it isn’t working, it just might be because of something you don’t know you didn’t do…

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 17 years, 4 months ago]

I am experiencing the same issue, and it seems like it is less about which plug in, and more about how many.

I’ve gone through and added/removed all of the buddy press components, and as soon as I have more than about 5 of them, I get 500 errors no matter what page it tries to load.

The fix for me was to make a file named php.ini, and within that file put:

memory=20MB

…and upload it to the wp-admin folder.

Basically 1and1’s PHP limit is probably set to like 8mb or 16mb, and BuddyPress is just too big for those britches. Of course, you can increase your memory size to whatever makes it work for you, but 20MB should be plenty.

I also put:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

…in my .htaccess file at the root directory to make sure 1and1 knew to give it php5 and not the 4 that it tries to give by default. Silly 1and1…