@scaffies it seems your having a hard time since the new update with the amount of posts about what has broke, ive got a good few test sites setup on my other computers that all run different plugins so i will test this new update with about 100 different plugins on different themes and sites over the weekend and see if anything breaks with any of these plugins too, what theme do you use? and have you tested the plugins together on default themes too to make sure its not just theme specific?
Like mentioned in another thread i really think you should test any major update with your current plugins on a test server to check out what may or may not of broken, this way you can report the issues to either the buddypress devs or plugin authors and wait for them to catch up or apply a quik fix until they do. I might actually test one of my dev sites tonight that is running 40 plugins to see what happens.
Thanks for your efforts!
We use a cmmercial theme (i.e. paid for) called DynamIX version 3.1.2 by themeva
http://themeforest.net/item/dynamix-business-corporate-wordpress-theme/113901
We do not really have that kind of background, skills, or resources to run test sites with default and other themes, and test all plug-ins against every change (I estimate we use about 50 plugins – we make sure that they are compliant with the latest WP versions, and are popular, i.e. proven on many thousands of sites).
A test site seems like a major pain in the butt, but given today’s events, may not be such a bad choice. We had expected there was more communication between developers, since WordPress and Buddypress are usied in such a HUGE number of sites – yet fairly simple updates break major stuff across many sites. So there may not be much of a choice of running a separate test site, or simply wait several weeks after new releases until the bugs are worked out – we do run another commercial security package, which may not make this too bad of a choice.
We got burned on EVERY BuddyPress update this is just by far the worst one so far. Sadly … since the software allows us to run a popular site.
Hmm, it sounds harsh that you get burned and have problems on each update because ive not really had many problems when updating in the past, maybe a few small ones but not many, and if i have had a few problems ive just held off updating for a couple of weeks until the fixes have been issued into buddypress or the plugins.
After trying out “ALOT” of themes (paid and free) with buddypress and wordpress over the past 2 years i have made my own conclusion that the best themes to use in both cases are usually the bare bones and lightweight themes that can have things integrated by yourself as and when needed, this way you are cutting out alot of problems that can be caused within the theme itself, i know some themes look amazing but they can also cause alot of problems for you in the future if not regular updated by the developer.
If your comfy with design i would always opt for a lightweight and barebones theme and build upon that. less things built into a theme = easier to troubleshoot! (This is just my opinion)
I have tried numerous themes that have caused wiered things to happen with certain plugins, yet work fine on the default themes for example.
As for setting up a local test server, this is quite easy to do now, you should definitely look into using something like XXAMP and give it a try.
I still havent got round to testing the new buddypress update yet on my themes and plugins as i fell asleep lol.
Thank you very much for your response(s)!
We will look into the test server, s o thanks for the tip with XXAMP.
And either way, going forward, we will definitely hol doff updating until several weeks have passed. Our understanding how the open source community and their developers work together was significantly too “rosy”, and the harsh reality brought us down to facing how it is really working – it may work fine if you are a coder / developer youself, but if you are not, and just work on administering what is there and concentrating on content, it easily becomes quite frustrating.
I’m not really sure creating two threads about problems with other plugins breaking was really necessary. One was sufficient.
