[Burt Adsit]

@stix1972 No it has nothing to do with apache config in any way. The communications between bbpress and buddypress are xmlrpc. That’s why Andy has us flipping switches in bbpress for xmlrpc and pingbacks. Apache is not involved.

The php curl library is what’s being used to find a link between bbpress and buddypress. This may not affect everyone. Matter of fact the xmlrpc stuff in wp and bbpress has 5 different ways of establishing a connection. It tries the curl method first. If curl is enabled on your site then it uses it.

My problem wasn’t with the curl library. It was working fine doing what it was supposed to do. My problem was that my server, which I’m supposed to know how to config because I’m the sysadmin for it, was not configured to enable php to go out and do low level stuff based on the settings in the /etc/hosts file.

Does that make any sense?

Group forums wasn’t working and I knew I had it configured correctly. Then I went looking for a different reason. I knew the code was ok because it worked for other people just fine. I debugged down to find out the exact error that was causing a problem then tracked it down to the curl lib not being able to resolve the correct ip address.

It was something in my environment other than bp and bbpress. The hosts file was it.

If forums aren’t working for you then this might be the problem. Then again it might not. This setup between bp and bbpress depends on so many factors being right, it’s a miracle it works at all. I’m guessing that’s one reason xmlrpc has 5 different ways of talking. Never know what environment it’s gonna run in.

[gogoplata]

Tried this but still no luck. Back to the drawing board.

Burtadsit, what method were you using to determine that it was 404’ing? I’m curious to test and see if I was/am receiving a 404 because that should help me pinpoint where the problem is.

[stix1972]

Yes I use A Small Orange. So I will contact them.

[stix1972]

Thanks, so it is on the Apache server. So we need to have the hosting site chage the host file. I can see if I can get in the backend bt I think that if it is on apache they will have to do it

OK I think that will help out. Yes the forums are not working It always say error in posting.

[gogoplata]

burtadsit – Did you successfully integrate cookies as well or just users?

[gogoplata]

stix1972 – Media Temple uses Plesk so you are likely not affected by this, though it may be a similar problem at your host, which I presume isn’t Media Temple as they don’t use cPanel as far as I know.

[Burt Adsit]

You only do it if group forums are not working for you and you are running on a dv. I don’t know how hosts other than Media Temple (mine) handle things. I can’t imagine it would be different though. They setup apache and all the operating system standard things for us and walk away. It’s a cookie cutter thing for them. They find what works for most of their customers.

Most of their customers at mt probably aren’t running trunk mu, bbpress and bp. Anyway, you have to edit your /etc/hosts file from root. I don’t know anything about cpanel. I have plesk which is similar. The tech support guy had me playing in plesk and all I accomplished thru there was turning off my subdomains.

I played in root with vi. If you can find a way to do this thru the dv backend, I’m sure loads of people would appreciate knowing about it.

Perhaps one of the people who freelance and visit here frequently could enlighten us?

(hint)

[Burt Adsit]

It’s crudely possible by just setting ‘only user accounts can be created’ in site > options. Then everyone is a ‘subscriber’. mu doesn’t have a variable setting for default user roles. subscribers can only comment on posts. Gonna hafta manually change them to something else.

See: https://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2292

for a discussion on this topic.

I wanna do something similar. I want to create a blog for each group at group creation time (optionally). All group members to have author/contributor roles.

Groups are the most important component in bp for me. Groups should have a wire, forum, and blog. And a bowling league. Bowling leagues are important too.

[stix1972]

So do you do this in the cpanel or do you do this in a WP file

[gogoplata]

So you’ve got the group forums working? Congrats and thanks for the how to! Going to try this out as soon as time permits.

[Burt Adsit]

Howdy people. I solved *my* group forums problem. I’m running on a dedicated virtual server account for mu/bp/bbpress. I found the solution to my problem with group forums. It might have something to do with yours.

See:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=426#post-1813

[Burt Adsit]

buddypress doesn’t create the blogs. wordpress mu does. Install mu with that option and you’ll get the subidirectory version of mu. I’d check the mu forums and around here before I chose that option though.

[zenseeker]

Thanks. I’ll try that bebopcool.

[bustherh]

People on the other forums seem to think this is a buddyPress issue. Later today I will remove all plugins to see if this is a WP-MU issue.

[Burt Adsit]

I got good news for ya meerblickzimmer. Ya it does work. I remember playing with it a couple of months ago. Just tried it again on my mu site. The config stuff is buried in the ‘secret’ options page. It’s not advertised, it’s just sorta there.

yourdomain.org/wp-admin/options.php

Here’s an mu thread.

https://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=1857

Happy posting.

[Meerblickzimmer]

@burtadsit: blog_by_email works just in WordPress, not in WordPress MU or i found no possibility to include this function via WPMU-Plugin. But that is not the right forum for WPMU – Plugin discussions..

[tabish]

I filled correct username.

And composed a Messege, when hit the button Send. It told me:

“Message could not be sent, please try again.”

So when should I try again?

Same error as when I post in Forum.. it says can not post this Topic. Looks like BuddyPress is not in a good mood

Regards

[Burt Adsit]

Thanks Andy. I’ll look at it when I get done with a smoke break.

I worked up that modification to mu core http.php and installed it on my DV server. Now it returns a valid pingback url.

However, yep there’s a however, group forums is still not working. I’ve even gone so far as to insert a ‘forum_id’ manually into the group meta data table for a specific group. It’s not reading from bbpress. Gonna look at it when I get back.

Progress not perfection ‘eh?

[Burt Adsit]

Hi Andy, Trent. I just assumed that I’d be able to send a msg to any user in the bp community. Friend or not. I saw the ‘send messge’ button in the user profile area now that you mentioned it. If I assume that, then run of the mill users will assume that too. Then I get to field the ‘why doesn’t it work questions’.

Ya know it’s gonna happen.

The group create not completing only happens on my DV server. Works fine on my windows box.(sigh)

I had group forums up and running on the windows box. Installed latest mu trunk and bp beta and that is not working now. Went thru all the integration and setup instructions as per the readme. No soap.

Hell, my windows mu install *was* talking to the forums on my DV bbpress install and locally. Now nothing, nowhere.

It’s lonely out here in the field.

[gogoplata]

I’m using Firefox and have cleared my cookies and cache multiple times but still didn’t have any luck.

Personally I’d like to have the auto-complete just look at a user’s username and “Full Name”. Like I said above, I have a friend “justin” on my site but when I type J only another user without any Js in their name is displayed. Also, I’d like to see the original messaging behavior re-implemented, along with an auto-complete as well, where a username could be typed directly into the Send To box. Because I can’t type them directly and the auto-complete isn’t working I have to manually visit profiles to send messages as opposed to simply typing them.

Andy, I know you said you tested it with 2.6.X and didn’t have any problems but you may want to try it on 2.7 as well as this is what a lot of us (and I assume TestBP.org as well) are running so we can try to get the forum functionality working.

I suspect this issues may also be related to the DV since it doesn’t seem too widespread and Andy hasn’t been able to replicate it.

[gogoplata]

In all liklihood our forum problems have the same cause as I’m also on a Media Temple DV.

It’s my finals week so I don’t have much time to dig into this thing too much until Friday afternoon but this is my top priority over break.

[Burt Adsit]

Hey. Well I’m getting closer to finding out a solution for my group forums problem. I know by digging deep into the bowels of the code that group forums is using, that in my case, it is eventually winding up at doing a curl_exec() call looking for the header from the bbpress install. It uses that to figure out the ‘pingback’ url for bbpress. It’s part of the xmlrpc stuff that we have to enable to get it to work.

This curl_exec call is part of a very common php lib that is used to go do http GETs and other nice things. That curl_exec() call always returns 404 on my linux dedicated virtual server box.

I’ve been beating my head against why this is happening for days now and sent off a tech support email to my host. This is the conversation between us.

Howdy,

I’ve got WordPress MU 2.7 trunk installed on my DV and it uses the curl_exec() function to grab some stuff from the returned header info. It’s not working at all on my DV. It always returns 404 even for a valid url.

This works fine on another box I’ve got running. Same code just different environment. It seems like curl isn’t working right here.

I tried a little test script as follows:

<?php

// create a new cURL resource

$ch = curl_init();

// set URL and other appropriate options

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, “http://ourcommoninterest.org&#8221;);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

// grab URL and pass it to the browser

curl_exec($ch);

// close cURL resource, and free up system resources

curl_close($ch);

?>

Can’t get more basic than that. The url it is trying to get is to a valid domain on my DV. This script returns an ‘apache test page’, not the normal results I’d expect if I visited with a browser. WPMU is up and running at that above url.

Trying a different url such as http://ourcommoninterest.org/bbpress/ gets back 404. This is also a valid working url on my DV. I’ve been trying to figure this one out for days without luck.

Any help would be appreciated muchly!

Burt

My host Media Temple’s response:

You are getting this 404 error when running curl on the server because ourcommoninterest.org is set to the default domain for the ip address. When the server does a curl on this domain it looks in the host file and brings up 127.0.0.1. This localhost address isn’t setup on the (dv) because it is in a virtual environment so it brings up the 404 error.

You can either use the ip address when referencing this domain through curl or create a new domain and set that domain to be the default domain. If you have any further questions regarding your (mt) Media Temple services, please feel free to contact us at any time.

My confused reply:

Sorry Frank. I’m new to this so I’m not getting the explanation or the solution. Let me echo back what I’m not hearing very well.

When curl_exec() is run from the same box the domain is hosted on, it goes out and gets results from 127.0.0.1 (localhost) when querying ‘ourcommoninterest.org’?

When I run the same curl_exec() with the same param ‘ourcommoninterest.org’ on a different server, it goes out, gets dns resolution, finds it on the DV at media temple, doesn’t get 127.0.0.1 but gets the ip address for ‘ourcommoninterest.org’ and is happy to return the results it finds there. (not 404)

I’m actually trying to get a result back from the url ‘http://ourcommoninterest.org/bbpress/&#8217;. So to bypass the hosts file problem I can just use ‘http://whatevermyipaddressis/bbpress/&#8217; to get the results I’m looking for?

Ya lost me completely on creating a new domain and setting that to the default domain. This would be a dummy domain that I just create thru plesk and still leave ‘ourcommoninterest.org’ hooked up to it’s current ip address?

(welcome to noob tech support)

This just happened a couple of minutes ago and frankly I’m no closer to understanding a solution. The only thing I can gather from all this tech noise is that it’s a result of being hosted as a dedicated virtual server.

[gogoplata]

I haven’t confirmed the group creation problem, but I too have been unable to setup the group forums.

[Burt Adsit]

Nope. You are not the only one. Strange behavior in messaging. Ya, autocomplete only looks at your friends list. That’s easily fixable. I was having probs sending msgs to valid usernames. No messages sent. No error msg.

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=413

I musta posted right after you. Been impatient and cranky lately. Not scanning the forums before I post. Happens when I can’t get a major feature like groups and messaging to work right.

[gogoplata]

You can search the forums at buddypress.org/forums/search.php, but you have to access that URL directly.