BuddyPress.org

Michael-

Since BuddyPress is a plugin for WordPress Mu, all that it requires is for WordPress Mu to be functioning properly. If WPMU does not find a .htaccess file in the directory in which it is installed, it will try to create one automatically.

Now, does WPMU require a .htaccess file? No. Why? Because people have successfully installed and run large WPMU-based sites on LightTPD and Nginx. These webservers do not support .htaccess files.

What WPMU uses the .htaccess file for (in an Apache or IIS environment) is to set rewrite rules for permalinks. In LightTPD and Nginx, this is accomplished through the webserver’s configuration file.

So, the question is this: What web server platform does Yahoo! Hosting use?

If their webservers are running Apache, then find out if mod_rewrite is turned off. A .htaccess file is basically useless without mod_write. This may be why they say that you can’t use a .htaccess file.

Here’s some information that might help: https://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks#Using_.22Pretty.22_permalinks

If you continue to have issues with this, I would switch to a host that allows you to use the WPMU .htaccess file.

BuddyPress is for WordPress MU,to have MU 2.8 it takes a while, when it will be

released buddypress works on 2.8 without problem.

Bertjohn, the site works now. How did you fix it. I have the same problem. I installed with bluehost also. WordPress MU and Buddypress are both installed. I have no additional plugins and I’m using the default buddypress templates.

Kunal, you need to read and learn wordpress documents. This is convered in the basics.

http://wpmu.org/category/how-to/

Dan-

I’m going to make just a few comments now. I’ll look at this in more detail tomorrow.

It look’s like you are using the default themes that come with BuddyPress–bphome and bpmember. Is this correct?

Pardon me if you know all this already but, when a user (one of your students) logs in, a link appears in the upper right corner of the buddybar with a link to their profile page. This link displays either their username or nickname. What is displayed depends on whether or not a nickname has been entered by the user. For all but four of your students, there is no nickname.

Now, when a student clicks this link, it will take them to their profile page. Once there, they can edit their profile. In the default BP install, there is a “Full Name” field in the profile that can be filled in.

WordPress Mu uses this data for the display in the backend–your picture #2. If the “Full Name” field is blank in their profile, then you will only see data in the “Username” and “nickname” fields, with the username used as the nickname. If a user has add anything to the “Full Name” field, then Mu will use that, and if it can, split it automatically into a “First name” and “Last name”.

The fact that 4 students have data in these fields indicates to me that they went to their profile page and clicked “Edit Profile” and then added their full name to the “Full Name” field. It is not a mystery.

Finally, when logged into WPMU’s backend, go to the “BuddyPress” menu group. Once there, click on “General Settings”. You will see a field named “Full Name field name”. Then, click on “Profile Field Setup”. There, you will see all of the currently-setup profile fields that your students can utilize. You can add, edit, or delete fields. You can make certain fields required.

You should spend some time not only in the WPMU’s backend, but also in the members’ area of BuddyPress to see how all of this works.

I hope this helps.

@Jedbarish-

Should I convert my wp sites into current wpmu setup or wait until they merge the codebase to start from there?

I would wait to see what transpires.

I’m sorry, I mistyped. I should have said 60% of my traffic, not the Internet.

The versions of IE where it is misaligned is 8.0, 7.0, 6.0, and 5.5. Basically all of them.

Have you looked in the members theme in the /css/ie/ directory? Also, does your custom member theme have links to the IE style sheets in your header.php file?

I saw a joke on Twitter the other day. To parapharse: the universe was created in one day. It took the other 5 to get it to work on Internet Explorer. Thanks, Trent!

Getting themes of any platform (not just WordPress) to work in all versions of IE can be frustrating and tricky at best, impossible at worst. I would focus on optimizing your users’ IE experience on IE8 and IE7. Some designers are not even supporting IE6 anymore. I wouldn’t even worry about IE5.5 Of course, this is only my opinion.

Concerning your answers In this thread.

Did you install WPMU as a directory or subdomain install? subdomains

Did you follow the detailed instructions in the WPMU’s readme.txt file about subdomain installs (listed under the heading DNS).

Did you upgraded from a previous version of WPMU? If so, from which version? Yes,I upgraded wpmu when I upgraded bp to 1.0 (not sure what previous version of WPMU was)

This could be an issue. You need to follow a specific WPMU upgrade path. If you do not, you can have all sorts of issues. See these links:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WPMU

https://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress_Extended

Do you have any plugins other than BuddyPress installed and activated? 3 plugin widgets of my own that display posts from the database

…AND…

Are you using the standard BuddyPress themes or customized themes? customised themes

To help you figure out what is going on, you need to distill your install down to the lowest common denominator. This means stripping out all extra stuff and focusing on the barebones environment.

So, you need to deactivate ALL plugins except BuddyPress. You need to use the default themes that come with BuddyPress. If the problems go away, then it is related to your custom theme and/or one of more of your plugins.

Here are a few more questions:

1. Which hosting firm are you using?
2. Did you manually install WPMU + BuddyPress or use a one-button installer?
3. There have been a few changes over time to WPMU’s wp-config.php file. If you simply used an older file this could also cause problems. Always verify that the config file you are using is up to date by comapring it to the config file that comes with each, newly downloaded WPMU install package. Did you use the wp-config.php file that came with WPMU 2.7.1?

For those of you who haven’t figured out how to get the plugin working here’s some quick details I figured out after installing this myself.

1. When you download the WPMU-Signup-Captcha from WPMUDev you’ll get three files that you’ll need to dig out of the directory structures wp-captcha.php, wp-captcha.tff, and wpmu-signup-captcha.php.

2. wpmu-signup-captcha.php belongs in wp-content/mu-plugins

3. wp-captcha.php and wp-captcha.tff are supposed to be placed in the root directory of where your wordpress MU installation is running from.

Good Luck!

Jake,

I think you can definately achieve what you need using Buddypress. The home page does not have to be community focused at all and can be as flexible as any WordPress run website (you will have to install some way for members to access the community tho). You just have to customize and install the theme you need as the home theme.

bp member theme works little differently from wordpress themes. I think you should open another thread under feature request category, letting developers know you want/hope this feature.

Might this help?

https://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks#Using_only_.25postname.25

Very exciting times ahead!

Should I convert my wp sites into current wpmu setup or wait until they merge the codebase to start from there? I want to do something now instead to wait much longer to start the project without any hassles.

Hi Pinastro! I’m a newbie here but I do know that SimpleScripts installations tend to be junkie and end up with 404 errors. It’s not that hard to install by hand — truly. Just take the instructions to install WordPress-MU, then BuddyPress, then BBPress bit by bit and it’ll be fine.

(Are you on Bluehost? I am and so I did first install with SimpleScripts and got the same errors so backed up, dropped the database tables and started over again.)

Good luck!

No, not to begin with. You could still use it to post to your blog within a BuddyPress install however.

Yes, deep integration, then you should just be able to use the existing nonce that is generated by WordPress.

You get what you pay for I guess. Although, in the case of BuddyPress… at a cost of $0.00… you get a whole lot more than you pay for.

Besides, if they waited until the system had absolutely everything… it would never be released. It was only released about a month ago. And now that there is an official 1.0 version out, I predict that developers will be flocking to it and developing lots of great third party plugins. It’s already happening. Consider that a couple of motivated developers have already freely donated their time to create pretty decent (if basic at the moment) events and photo gallery plugins!!!!! Pretty awesome if you ask me.

As for document management… there are a number of standard WordPress plugins that will handle that for you. Of course, it won’t be integrated into the groups, activity feeds, etc… it would just be a WordPress page with downloads on it… but one of those plugins might serve as a stop-gap for you for now.

If you really want/need free social networking software that is more feature complete now… right now… try Elgg. But it doesn’t have nearly the same amount of developer interest, buzz and support… it’s no where near as user-friendly… and creating a theme that does anything more than change a few background colors and images is next to impossible. I did a lot of research into these two options and BuddyPress… even with the limits of it’s current 1.0 feature set… was the hands down winner. No contest.’

Finally, you say you don’t care if something if free or paid for… you only care about the final product. Well, if that’s the case, there are literally scores of commercial web applications out there right now that do similar things… socially networked Wiki’s, Intranets, etc… but most of them are very expensive. Look at SocialText, Telligent, Confluence, ClearSpace, MindTouch, Thought Farmer… and on and on. Tons of them. Some are more Wiki-like with some social stuff added and some are more Facebook like with some Wiki stuff added… but there is certainly no shortage of commercial options out there.

I’m having the same issue regarding the buddypress welcome widget.

I have buddypress working 100% on server_1 and I moved it to server_2.

I used gzip through SSH to compress the html directory containing the entire WordPress Mu and Buddypress installation. Then I used scp through SSH to transfer the tarball to server_2 and then extracted it.

I exported the MySQL database from server_1, and opened it in Notepad++. I did a search and replace for the olddomain.com changing it to the newdomain.com. I also search and replaced the directory path from /usr/local/apache/htdocs to /var/www/html. Then I imported the database to server_2 in a table with the same name as the old server, then edited the wp-config.php to use the new database.

In theory all this should work, but the only thing that isn’t is the text on the welcome widget, I can change it etc but it only displays the first character. Other widgets save and work fine, it’s seems to be just an issue with this one. I also haven’t altered any of the core files. I’ve also tried removing commas, etc in the MySQL for the welcome widget content portion before importing it.

I’m going to tinker with it further, such as disabling all widgets/plugins before moving the database to the new server, then enabling them. I know WordPress suggests this when migrating to a new server, although I have never needed to before. I’m using WordPress Mu 2.7.1 and Buddypress 1.0.

Thanks for any ideas.

The error I’m getting is:

Catchable fatal error: Object of class WP_Error could not be converted to string in /Users/davelewis/Sites/wpmu/wp-content/plugins/bp-album.php on line 324

I’ve noticed that I only get this error when attempting to upload small images. When I try to upload a big image, the browser just spins and nothing happens. If you look at the plugin code around line 324… it’s looking at the size of the uploaded file and then using one of two functions to generate thumbnails via the WordPress function wp_create_thumbnail().

So it must have to do with my environment or WordPress MU setup. I’m using the built-in PHP in Leopard which (annoyingly) doesn’t come with the GD Library. So perhaps that is the issue. Safe to assume that wp_create_thumbnail() utilizes the GD Library. I’ve tried installing the entropy distribution of PHP5 before and it’s been a huge pain to get it working. So for development purposes (on my local machine)… I just use the Leopard PHP build.

There is some kind of a plugin for WordPress witch give users the ability to choose the theme to use for the blog. This is a plugin for normal WordPress, but I cant see any reason this should not work if you activate it only for the main blog.

I don’t know if this plugin will list all the themes in the themes-directory or if you can choose what themes to have in the list. I’m looking for the same thing Ronia, so I will check out that plugin and come back to this thread with some updates.