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Grasping at straws now – should WPMU & BP be in same DB or different?


  • gazouteast
    Participant

    @gazouteast

    I’ve tried 3 different installs of WPMU 2.8.4a and BP 1.1.2 (sub-domain set up in site root install) on three different hosting services on three different continents (UK, US, & Singapore) all with MySQL 5.x, PHP 5.x, and 128 – 256 MB RAM available.

    For each install, fresh downloads of WPMU & BP were made, therefore reducing the possibility of corrupted code being transferred from server to server, unless the code in the WPMU/BP servers that deliver to SE Asia is already corrupted?

    The only plugins active at any time were (in WPMU) Akismet and Default Blog Settings … and BuddyPress of course. No BuddyPress plugins were activated at any time.

    On all three servers, I got exactly the same problem with the Groups avatar upload / cropping tool that I reported as a bug in trac (which someone appears to have deleted) and which I’ve tried to resolve for over a week now here in the BP forums, and in the WPMU forums. THe only useful pointer I’ve discovered came in fact from the osCommerce forums and related to the javascript used to resize images in the avatar cropper – even though it was referring to an entirely different sitescript and tool, although the usage was similar.

    So here we go again, and for the lord knows how manyth time, let me describe the behaviour –

    1 – first time access to the Creat Groups sub-routine (i.e. first ever group created on a site with new install) on the Group avatar page, the Back, Upload, Skip buttons appear.

    2 – attempting to upload an avatar (all attempts – first time, second time, exit and return and try again, go to admin and edit group avatar etc) the cropper tool fails to grab the image and displays only a black 88px x 16px background “bar” in the avatar viewer.

    3 – At step 2 above, after the very first upload attempt for the site, the Back & Skip buttons on the avatar upload page disappear (this means the avatar cannot be skipped and jump to send invites, nor go back to try and reload the page fresh for another attempt within the create group loop.)

    After each attempt that reaches step 2, there is a report from BP that the image failed to upload, but the image is in the correct directory/folder on the server, with the correct filename etc and can be viewed using the cpanel image viewer from file manager.

    There is NO server log error spawned from the avatar uploader/cropper – ergo – it is the javascript that is incomplete, or pointing to the incorrect file location, or cannot follow the complete path to the file (exactly who decided to place a period in the folder name blogs.dir – and why – I’m sure that’s at least a piece of the problem). It is possible to cause the uploader/cropper to spawn a server error log by not “browsing” to acquire an image, then clicking save – the “no image selected, unable to save” type message does record to the server error log, proving that bit of the code to server interface is working.

    Let me clarify step 3 – the Back and Skip buttons only ever appear ONE time, which is the very first time the Group Avatar page is accessed on any one site install. After that, they never appear again – poof! gone! disappeared into the ether! – their code does not even appear in page source (using mouse – right click – view source) nor does it reveal in code or css when viewing with firebug.

    It is as if the Back and Skip buttons have been programmed as a one-time only “display then destroy” piece of code – a bit like toilet tissue?

    So, the “grasping at straws” question –

    The only thing I have not yet tried is to put WPMU & BP into their own databases – does BP require that it is installed into a different database to WPMU? All the documentation (and default install) puts it in the WPMU database with unique “bp_” prefixes.

    Everything above tested and displayed in Firefox 3.5.3 and IE 6.5 on WinXP & Win2000 workstations, and on Win2000 Server box (in both server and workstation mode) with hosting on Linux/CentOS shared hosting services at THREE different hosting companies on three different continents …. although I haven’t tried a southern hemisphere hosting company yet – maybe the upside down “down under” positioning will give a different result? LOL

    The issue / bugs above are still not resolved

    – I did report them in the bug tracker, but someone deleted the report.

    – I have reported them several times in BP forums and DJPaul keeps telling me to start my own thread, OK – here it is

    – Looking through the BP forums, this issue (avatar cropper) is going the same way as the basic “WP flash uploader failing to complete crunching and upload” bug over on WP.org – and that has hundreds if not 1000’s of threads open for it (since WP 2.5.x).

    Help appreciated

    Gaz

Viewing 5 replies - 26 through 30 (of 30 total)

  • John James Jacoby
    Keymaster

    @johnjamesjacoby

    Not everyone has Photoshop, or even knows how to crop images down to exact sizes. I know that sounds silly, but it’s true. min-width type CSS isn’t supported in IE. Plus being able to adjust and crop your avatar yourself instead of trusting an auto-script to get your face just right where you want it makes more sense.

    But, if you wanted to ditch the avatar cropper and replace it with simpler automated libraries, that’s very possible to do also by unhooking and not using the existing functions, and replacing them with your own custom ones.


    gazouteast
    Participant

    @gazouteast

    OK – thanks all

    I’m sorry if it appeared I abandoned ship – I went back to the beginning and uncovered an issue with WPMU that may be contributory …

    Undocumented in the WPMU readme file and not specifically called out anywhere in their forums or Trac, WPMU requires that the PHP function readfile() be enabled – my hosts for some strange reason had it disabled. This meant that images in WPMU were not displaying onto blog posts in the edit screen or public pages. They’ve now fixed this and I’m about to try putting buddypress back into what is around the dozenth reinstall of WPMU.

    The current WPMU reinstall is 100% vanilla with zero plugins or tweaks – not even an extra theme in the themes folder – so this will be the acid test of whether or not that was the issue.

    Wish me luck – I’ll post back with results

    Gaz


    gazouteast
    Participant

    @gazouteast

    Hi all – I’m very pleased to say that the above fix appears to have been the root problem with avatar uploads and cropping – they work great now

    Many thanks to all who contributed – perhaps the php readfile() function requirement should be added to the install readme? It’s save a lot of support topics appearing here in the forums.

    Gaz


    Jeff Sayre
    Participant

    @jeffsayre

    @Gaz

    Nice catch!


    gazouteast
    Participant

    @gazouteast

    Thanks Jeff – I had one heart-stopping moment after BP reinstall when one of the images on the test blog post didn’t load – but that was a connection blip via the ISP. When I refreshed the page, it came up normally.

    That function absolutely is needed by the avatar cropper too – I spotted a call for it in the code, so it needs added to the pre-install requirements list. I checked around a few hosting services using pre-sales livechat functions, there’s an awful lot of them have it turned off by default, especially on the east side of the Atlantic.

    Gaz

Viewing 5 replies - 26 through 30 (of 30 total)
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