11-05-08: We thought we had an answer when we edited lines in wp-includes/pluggable.php, but it hasn’t helped. Tsk. For example we delete a post and once deleted it reappears, with the home page of the blog inserted in the alert box. Huh? We’re checking the forums right now. This is bizarre!

12-05-08: Well, we have moved on, but how far I am not sure. For one thing we have discounted caching problems, and for another discovered the excellent plugin for Firefox called “Firebug”. This has narrowed the problematic behaviour to the prototype.js file. Or seems to have done. Still not sure. Anyway, we have several different iterations of this javascript and we’re about to test them one at a time.

Later: Moving on from the javascript, the server issue may have edged in front as the search for the culprit widens. It seems our hosting co. may have migrated us to microsoft servers (ugh!) from the LAMP environment which is so necessary for WPMU to function properly. If this is the case and I can get it confirmed I’ll either work around it or get them to migrate us back. The latter is preferable. But we’re still talking ifs and buts.

Later still: Well, there seems to have been a problem with the .htaccess file (it was blanked) which can’t have helped, but the javascript and AJAX is still making the posting of updates and pictures impossible. Onward!

This presents problems for extant WPMUs: with a raft of members and a great deal of content the ‘vanilla install’ means BuddyPress ain’t going to be applicable to them, in particular us. We can of course create a second install of WPMU and engage in some form of db-hackery to get the installs to share users, but it is hardly ideal. So we’re back to what we can do now:

At present it is entirely possible to produce profile pages which move some way to a social networking function. The work we have done has produced extended profiles, which also run feeds, a mini-blog and comments. We did this by cannibalising the proto-plugin Tribe (designed as a tool for gamer teams) and re-formatting the author page with among other things a double-loop and a RSS feed.

And yes, I did mention forumsssss. We now have 2. One for public consumption here, and the other for the OTFA project here. This allows us to keep the OTFA forum tightly regulated and yet allow the whole site to benefit from the SEO capability of bbPress in the public forum. To access these directly from the main site, the public forum is available from the menu tabs in the header, and the OTFA forum in the lefthandside menu, under “Other OTFA websites”.

In both cases membership of the forargyll.com website is a pre-requisite, and for the OFTA forum, you must contact admin to get clearance into the relevant topic area.

Other recent developments on the site are:

• Simplification of the main design to allow easy access to the latest, greatest posts from users
• Streamlined the number of wpmu blogs to allow community ownership
• Re-registration is now required for all OFTA project members to enable them to choose their own usernames and passwords.
• We are starting to implement social network functionalities (which won’t be properly available for a while), but which you can see a preview of when you click on the author link of any post — here’s mine

• Aggr.
• Akismet.
• All-in-One-SEO.
• Collapsing Category Menus
• Collapsing Page Menus
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
• Dashbar - and we have customised it and it still works!
• Event Calendar - though we’re still not really sure about this one, and think we might set up a blog for it all on its own …
• Exec-PHP
• Lighter Admin Drop Menus - the lighter way to blog
• Simple Forum — Well, this worked and was great, but then we integrated bbPress and it became redundant.
• SmartRSS — Good grief Charlie Brown! We could populate the world with blog entries with this one!

And plugins which ain’t (or don’t seem to be) MU friendly:

• Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form — It is a great plug-in and we wanted to use it, but haven’t the nouse to get around the fatal error it causes. Ho-hum.
• Slim Stats — wants to do everything, but records nuffin. sheesh.
• Userextra — won’t play, more’s the pity because it would have been an easy way to make private forums for groups of users ….

Then of course there is the matter of bbPress and its integration with WPMU – we had it up and running within in half an hour. The only wrinkle was permalinks which completely wonked out and made running the forum on the url forum.forargyll.com a nightmare. Basically, anything other than the home page ended up at the 404 error page on the For Argyll site. So we went to a date specific post hierarchy where forargyll.com/forum can be nothing else other than a forum, and we have had to utilise the nasty /?thread=12 form.

This list is not finished and we’ve had some really interesting other bits which when resolved we’ll add.