BuddyPress.org

I have found a solution to my problem – but don’t know exactly why these issues arose. I shall elaborate in case anyone else has similar problems:

I have also been experiencing problems with the themes for blogs being all messed up. Regardless of how they were activated – either globally or on a blog-by-blog basis, they never displayed properly. Possible an obscure redirect issue. At the same time I was experiencing the messaging issues for which I started this thread.

I think that these problems cropped up sometime between:
– upgrading from WP MU 2.9.1 > 2.9.2
– upgrading Buddypress 1.2.x > 1.2.3
which were both done manually AND
– trying out a whole buch of plugins that had not been tested (or verified) to work with my versions of BP and WPMU.

So I rolled the whole site back – files and mysql to about a month ago – before I upgraded and fucked up my database. Then copied any posts, files, members, activities etc from one database to the other…

So the lessons I learned from the sorry mess is:
– Backup regularly (this goes without saying)
– don’t try out spurious plugins that may damage your install (and lead to days of head-beating-on-wall WTF? moments)

Also – running the whole site on Amazon Web Services which gives you cheap access to ubiquitous storage (S3) at insanely low cost. So I run a script that backs up all files and mysql from the site daily and hang the GB that will accrue – because each GB cost something like $0.01 – or something….And this just saved my sanity.

Regards

Ajax