breaker of stuff, destroyer of things

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I’ve decided to start documenting a project I’m working on. hopefully it can help others. Everything is offered as “it worked for me”. This will be an ongoing series till I’m done with the project. I’ll post as i get time to, not as often as my regular posts, but as i can.

The Scope

This project needs to offer forums, blogs, guestbooks, friend features, ads, profiles, and other features my brain is forgetting to mention (i need sleep). there won’t really be any custom themes (not covered within scope) so the modifications made may only help get you started

I’m using the latest version of wmpu as of posting : 1.2.4

Some Back Story

Ok heres some back story on why i’m doing this. The company i’m doing this for is an internet cafe / coffee house / bookstore chain that focuses on rural markets. The goal is to help users become more .connected through there services. Which seems like a good idea due to the fact about 50-70% of their users online use the net at their cafes.

So Far

So far I’ve hacked some of the admin, found a decent theme and modded it somewhat.

Here’s a quick run down of features working:
*all these plugins should be running from mu-plugins — see next section for tips if your having issues*

site wide feeds :
http://www.itdamager.com/plugins/wpmu-sitewide-feed/

tagging (i use on all sites, but use site wide tags feature on main site) :

I initially tried the latest version which some people have been able to use, after wrestling with it for a bit i tried the 1.6.2 version which ran great after maybe one or two tweaks. I’ll eventually go back to getting the last version to work, but that’s a time best spent issue.

http://trac.herewithme.fr/project/simpletagging/browser/branches/1.6.2

site wide tags (i use on main site) :
make sure you edit the file
http://daankortenbach.nl/blog/webontwikkelaar/wpmu-site-wide-tags-solution/

js box admin style (the spotmilk folder) :
http://jsbox.net/247

events :
replace all reference to the plugins or eventcalender3 folders with mu-plugins
*i should note you can probably leave the eventcalender3 folder ref’s alone and just make a loader file*
http://wpcal.firetree.net/

what would seth gordin do:
again replace plugin ref’s, this is my favorite wordpress plugin - just thought i should mention that
http://www.richardkmiller.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do/

comment tracker : I don’t remember where i got this

Bad behavior :
copy the wordpress file and the bad-behavior subfolder to mu-plugins - should work out the box
http://www.homelandstupidity.us/software/bad-behavior/

Making plugins work with wordpress mu

this is by no means a perfect science, but using the following steps i’ve only found one plugin i couldn’t get to work under mu, but then again it doesn’t work under regular wordpress either
first find of plugins references : you need to change all plugin references to mu-plugins.

either place everything directly in mu-plugins, or create a loaded. a good example of this is stp. you have to make a loader file to use it. a loader does nothing more than sit in you mu-plugins folder, and include the main plugin file from its folder.

track includes: when dealing with css (we all should be to some extent) check the source generated for the stylesheet includes. about 2 times so far, i’ve wondered why a feature wasn’t working, only to realize it’s css wasn’t included correctly, so it wasn’t displaying.

Full plugin Listing

Here’s Two screen shots that list everything installed to date

here’s an ftp view of the mu-plugins folder

Hacks

I’ve changed the admin area to use the sitewide feed as the feed displayed at a users admin. I’ve also removed all wordpress / theme branding, changes some of the labels used admin wide to reflect the main site / profile idea, and added some logic to the theme which detects if your currently at the main site, or a user site (will effect options, text).

my theme uses a function.php and it’s loaded before everything else, so thats where i’m placing all custom functions.

One thing I’ve noticed is that you must do a global $VAR before using any custom vars everytime. It doesn’t matter if i have two php snippets two line away from each using the same var. if I don’t have a global for the var it won’t work.

see ya next time

I know right now this is very little info, but as i continue it’ll eventually start to resemble something close to a community. The next steps for me are adding friends support, making profile pages, private messaging, forums, and hacking the admin area to to crippled when used from anything but the main site. I’m still debating whether I’ll go with vanilla or bbpress, both have wordpress support, but right now it’s looking like bbpress.

No idea when i’ll get back to this project (I have 6 months till soft launch), but I’ll try to post regularly, even if it’s only bits and pieces as i do them.

• wordpress mu
• wordpress mu based social network
• work in progress
• how to: integrate wordpress and vanilla
• using wordpress from multiple locations