The weekend of November 14, I took a trip down to Manhattan from my Native Boston to attend WordCamp NYC. I chose WPMU/BuddyPress track due to my latest work with Hunt and Gather

There’s a lot of WordPress royalty here – developers and thought leaders who are granularly famous inside of the *Press community. I’m hoping to get a chance to talk with them to show them my work and maybe ask a few quick questions.

On twitter, you can follow event tweets by following the #wcnyc hashtag. This is going to be useful throughout the conference. For example, it just told me about the book “Microtrends” and it’s relevance towards WPMU / BuddyPress.

I apologize if this is unclear or hard to follow. Admittedly, these notes are more for my own purposes than they are for somebody who didn’t attend the conference. However, I’m open to, and openly welcome discussionon any of these points.

Sessions I attended

Growing Community With BuddyPress

• BuddyPress != Facebook
• Facebook happens in front of everybody (i guess)
• BuddyPress all happens in front of a niche community
• Big advances in BuddyPress Groups coming – there’s going to be a whole session later about it
• Basically just an overview of BuddyPress features for people who aren’t familiar with the platform
• Site examples: Bugle Notes, We Earth, Nourish Network, Sports Grants
• The problem with using such a young technology as BuddyPress is that things change quickly, and drastically. Two recent examples are the handling of theming and the handling of groups / forums.
• Not supposed to edit the BuddyPress parent theme. It’s an override system. I can’t believe I missed that. Whoops.

User Authentication with WPMU in Existing Ecosystems

• External authentications such as LDAP, Shibboleth, OpenID, CAS
• LDAP and Shibboleth are time trusted technologies but are easily susceptible to social engineering.
• LDAB and Shibboleth does authentication and authorization, OpenID and CAS only do authorization.
• OpenID “works like paypal” meaning it takes you away briefly to an external site to perform the authentication.
• Expensive commercial authentication software doesn’t allow things like user facing password reset. Awesome!

• The plan – replace all user facing login stuff with wp-login.php

  • Use plugin to create alternate email address + cell phone field and lock down the primary email address.
  • Log into wordpress -> Check WP credentials -> if no WP credentials -> check external auth -> if match then provision account for WP.
• The idea of multiple usernames (email, secondary email, cell phone number) is interesting.
• “Older” users without email address (really?) can be authenticated via an SMS gateway.
• Was hoping for stuff about Facebook Connect but OH WELL!
• Info about Alternate Contact Info, WordPress Ticket Framework, wpSMS available at Maison Bisson’s site:

Beyond Sharing – Open Source Design

• Brought to you by Shift Space – pretty neat idea.
• Getting designers into a versioning system involves a lot of kicking and screaming.
• “You can always tell an open source project by the fact that it’s ugly.”
• One person, one path, one goal: No reason to collaborate. One person, multiple paths, one goal: Perfect environment for collaboration. The problem is that the more people join, the more goals there seem to be.
• The idea is to meet at a common point in the middle and all collectively move together towards our own goals on the SAME path, and then split off at a closer point.
• Chicken + Egg Problem: Designers are not involved in open source software because open source software is not good enough because designers are not involved in it. Also, we can’t force people to use bad tools as an ideologic statement.
• The nature of communication: A mutual language is chosen (say, english), a message is sent, and then decoded by the receiver (human or computer).
• Some “solutions” to consider:
  • Defining a language: graphic, color, layout, animation, interaction, etc.
  • Set collaboration standards.
  • Standards i.e. Grid systems and CSS frameworks
  • Research exists and is out there: Smashing Magazine’s example
  • Providing a strict set of assets can hinder innovation. However, the more assets you provide, the more liberating it becomes. Example: iPhone
  • Example: HappyCog’s leadership with the WordPress 2.5 admin panel and the wordpress team’s modifications in 2.7
  • Example: Wordpress Icon Design “competition” and the process by which the community chose icons. Not “yes” or “no” on each icon set but also “yes” or “no” on the metaphors.
  • When possible, use code. When possible, use a version control system.
  • Research! Style guides!
  • Everything seems to come down to vision and leadership.
• An inconsistent design fragments the message.
• The lecture returns to ShiftSpace but with an interesting idea: not just user generated content but user generated interfaces.

The rest of the program today is very Buddypress heavy. I didn’t take as many notes because I was doing some hands-on stuff with the devs and also trying to close some tickets for work since I was feeling inspired!

BuddyPress Group Extension API

• Andy Peatling is live building a plugin for us after a brief explanation of what an API is.
• Very awesome tutorial but not worth writing extensively about. It’s similar to the wordpress widget API. Basically going over what’s detailed here.

Developing BuddyPress as a Collaboration Hub

• Philosophy professor from CUNY speaking about the CUNY academic commons, which uses buddypress as the hub and WordPress, bbPress, and MediaWiki as the spokes.
• Custom plugin creation for bbPress mostly.
• Single sign on for WP-MW
• Getting the BuddyBar to show up in MediaWiki = using jQuery to call a post-slug that ONLY has the footer.php in it.
• Sometimes you just gotta write directly to the database… sometimes.

BuddyPress Templating

• BuddyPress’ templating system functions on an override system. Everything inherits from the parent theme, and every file you add will override the parent file.
• This solves problems where upgrades break stuff, etc
• Look in the *-templatetags.php file in each of the /wp-content/plugins/buddypress subfolders for the functions you want.

Tuning WordPress and the LAMP Stack for Speed and Stability

• Expecting too much traffic? Traffic too slow? (The answer should really always be YES)
• WP-SuperCache, obviously
• WP-Tuner
• “When your server slows down, you need to put as many tools in front of your face to give you things to try until you try it.”
• Try not to do writes on every page view.
• Cache expensive queries as serialized arrays in wp_options table – if you can store things in options, DO IT.
• Look into content delivery networks
• Unix commands: top or htop, apachetop, tail, less, mytop
• Claim: most problems are solved with MaxClients, ServerLimit, MaxRequestsPerChild
• https://launchpad.net/mysql-tuning-primer
• http://mmonit.com/monit/
• If all else fails, scale your hardware!

Hyperlocal Journalism, Meet BuddyPress

• BuddyPress + Open Registration
• Needs an active community manager that lives and breathes the Site
• Using PMs to issue assignments and edits, Member profiles to ensure some degree of accountability
• Some plugins: Post Google Map, Adminimize, Welcome Pack, WP Wall, TweetMeme
• Other cool hyperlocal tools: SeeClickFix, Outside.In

http://domain.com/forums/forum/name-of-forum/

http://domain.com/forums/topic/name-of-topic/

etc..

Not exactly ideal. It would be better if they looked more like:

http://domain.com/forums/name-of-forum/name-of-topic

So I found this post on the bbPress forums, which led me to this packaged plugin by Ashsh Mohta. However, a few things were busted – new posts, and also paging on forums and topic names that end with “forum/” or “topic/”

With a few modifications, I finally got it working, and here are the steps that I took. Note: This requires a bit of bbPress core hacking, but it’s literally only switching the order of two lines in the code.

1. Enable name based permalinks in /bb-admin/options-permalinks.php
2. Download the plugin from this page, put it in your my-plugins folder, and enable it
3. Change the .htaccess file at the root of your bbPress install to the htaccess.dist file packaged with the plugin.
4. Open up bb-post.php at the root of your bbPress install and simply switch lines number 46 and 48

I’m sure this isn’t perfect, and I’d love any and all feedback. It’s been working like a charm for me for a little while now, and hopefully it will help you! I’d love to find both a way to install this and have the plugin automatically backup and rewrite the .htaccess file, and of course a way to do it without editing the core code.

Plugin: Clean Up bbPress Permalinks

This was something that was bothering me for a while – Several of my clients’ WordPress blogs were hosted on my server, all with slightly different versions and modifications. This creates a mess of files across all your DocumentRoots – nearly identical but just different enough to become tedious and cluttered. These instructions provide a possible solution: Running wp-mu centrally across any number of top level domains.

These instructions assume a basic knowledge of the command line and MySQL, and that you have at least a VPS or a dedicated server. Shared hosting users do not dispair, as some hosting companies can be awesome and help if you call tech support. Some hosting companies.

I can’t tell you exactly what file to put the Apache directives since every operating system and every version of apache has a number of different places where you can do so, but I would be happy to include different information on where to put these directives for all the different distros and whatnot, I just need people to send them to me!

I’d be curious to hear other people’s takes on this stuff. Please let me know what you think of these methods and if you’ve had any similar experiences.

Initial Setup.

1. Download the wordpress core code with svn. I chose to put it into a directory called /opt/wordpress-mu:

   cd /opt
   svn http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-mu/tags/2.8.2/ wordpress-mu

   This way, if you want to update later all you need to do is replace [new-version] with the new version number:

   cd /opt/wordpress-mu
   svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-mu/tags/[new-version]/

2. Edit your virtualhost file to include the following directives. This is the minimum of what you’ll need to make sure to include:

   <VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerName www.oneofmanyblogs.com
     ServerAlias oneofmanyblogs.com *.oneofmanyblogs.com
     DocumentRoot /opt/wordpress-mu
   </VirtualHost>

3. Restart Apache, navigate your browser to your blog url, and perform the standard wordpress-mu installation process (start at step 4).
4. So what we have now is no different than the standard wordpress-mu install except we’ve decided to install it in /opt instead of a more standard Apache directory like, say, /var/www. Here’s where the magic begins. I have to give a shout out to Reverend over at http://bavatuesdays.com for his excellent post on wordpress-mu’s ability to handle multiple domains, since it led me to the WPMU multiple sites plugin. So let’s continue with this plugin in mind:

   cd /opt/wordpress-mu/wp-content/mu-plugins
   wget http://wpmudev.org/download/1193384369_njsl-sites-009.php

5. Finally, we get to the browser. Navigate to /wp-admin. Since the plug-ins in this folder are automatically activated, you will now see a “Sites” submenu of Site Admin. Click to there and the next bit of awesomeness begins.

Adding Fresh Blogs and Domains

1. Add your new site to the control panel accessible via the “Sites” submenu item of Site Admin. I usually enter the url twice, “/” as the path, and the name of the site as you’d like it to appear in the header of the page. Then, click Create Site.
2. Lets say we’re adding yetanotherblog.com. Go back to your virtualhosts file and edit the ServerAlias line like so:

   ServerAlias oneofmanyblogs.com *.oneofmanyblogs.com yetanotherblog.com www.yetanotherblog.com *.yetanotherblog.com

3. Restart apache again and your new blog should be up and running! It’s as easy as that. Notice that your admin login you created for oneofmanyblogs.com works here as well. Enjoy your new blog. What if you have an existing blog you want to transfer over? Well… that’s a slightly different endeavor.

Migrating an Existing Blog to your new WordPress-MU blog system (ninjas only)

1. Before we begin, do all the steps in the “Adding Fresh Blogs and Domains” section to create a new Site with the domain name of the blog you’re transitioning over.
2. In order to migrate over, you’re going to need a two things: a copy of your original blogs wp-content folder, and a MySQL dump of your original blog’s database. However you choose to get these things to where you need them is up to you. Let’s just assume that you have them. First, merge the files from wp-content/plugins, wp-content/uploads, and wp-content/themes into the central wordpress-mu/wp-content folder.
3. Then, you need to alter your sql dump file a bit. The way WP-MU names the tables is wp_1_[tablename] for the first blog, and wp_2_[tablename] for the second and so on and so forth. Since we’ve already created this blog as a fresh blog, the tables already exist, prefixed, let’s say, by wp_3_. What we’ll want to do is rename every table in your old sites sql dump from wp_[tablename] to wp_3_[tablename], then transfer every table from your old blog over except the wp-options table, the wp_users table, and the wp_usermeta table. (Trust me, including these table will really mess up your chi.)

   mysql -u [user] -p[password] [database-name]
   > RENAME TABLE wp_3_options TO _wp_3_options;
   > exit;
   sed 's/wp_/wp_3_/g' sqldump.sql > sqldump_3.sql
   mysql -u [user] -p[password] [database-name] < sqldump_3.sql
   mysql -u [user] -p[password] [database-name]
   > DROP TABLE wp_3_options, wp_3_users, wp_3_usermeta;
   > RENAME TABLE _wp_3_options TO wp_3_options

4. There, all the heavy lifting is over and now you can log back in as admin, install the plugins, activate the theme, and do all the normal WP-MU admin panel stuff that is not covered in the scope of this tutorial. Not too too bad, right?

Advantages of This System

1. First, from an administrative standpoint, it’s easier to maintain. Installs are done via svn up and you only need to do it once for all the sites. There is a concern about database overhead once you get up into dozens or even hundreds of sites, but for now this works as a solution.
2. Content can more easily shared among the blogs, now that they know about each other a little more and share a database.
3. Each blog can now have a ton of different blogs too. So not only is each domain its own blog, but each domain can have multiple subdomains, all blogs, all running from a central WP install.