Posts Tagged ‘wordpress mu’

After discovering Flickr only allows a maximum of 200 photos uploaded to your photo stream without upgrading, I decided to do what I originally planned and host my pictures locally. The only issue was most photo plugins I was interested in required WordPress 2.7 or higher, and I was running 2.6. As a result, I decided to go ahead and upgrade my WordPress MU install although as usual things didn’t go as planned. I used this tutorial for some guidance, although after reading through it I decided to just do it without going through each step.

1. First, backup your MySQL tables using phpMyAdmin. I’m not going to go through each step this entails, if your not sure just do some googling. I used the export tool and exported my database as a .sql file.
2. Next, backup all current WP files.
3. WordPress 2.7 has a few changes in the wp-config.php file, mostly realting to security changes and cookies. The tutorial I referenced above goes through a step by step process to edit your wp-config.php file, however in the end it didn’t work for me and after my upgrade I was unable to login to the WP backend. After some trouhbleshoting, these are the steps I took for editing my wp-config.php file:
   1. Place the following code after $base = ‘/’;
      
define('DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'scaleddesign.net' );
define('PATH_CURRENT_SITE', '/' );
define('SITE_ID_CURRENT_SITE', 1);
define('BLOGID_CURRENT_SITE', '1' );

      Replace the domain with your own, not including the http://www. portion, the PATH_CURRENT_SITE should reflect where your WP install is located, for example /blog if your blog is located at domain.com/blog.
   2. Place the following code after define(‘SECURE_AUTH_SALT
      
define('NONCE_KEY', '');
define('AUTH_SALT', '');

      Replace ” with a randomly generated string from http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/
4. Once you have edited your wp-config.php file, remove all your old WordPress files on your site.
5. Upload a fresh install of WordPress MU, which can be obtained from http://mu.wordpress.org/download/
6. Upload your newly edited wp-config.php file into the base WordPress directoy.
7. Be sure to check before hand that all your plugins and themes are compatible with 2.7. Remove all the contents of /wp-content and replace them with the contents from your 2.6 installation.
8. Login to your WP backend and run a sitewide update by going to Site Admin -> Upgrade tab.

Everything should be good to go! If you have trouble logging in, I would suggest looking at your wp-config.php file and making sure everything is in place. The sample config file that comes in the fresh WordPress install is a helpful reference as well. Also be sure to check your directory permissions as this could be an issue as well. The above worked for myself, however there are a number of nuances between different server configurations and hosting services, what I did may or may not work for you.

For one of my projects, atfe.org, I use a WordPress MU installation with a BuddyPress installation on top to provide social networking features. This site, however, is more professionally oriented and therefore I wanted to change references such as “Friends” to “Contacts” and so forth. As I didn’t want to change every line of code that contained “Friends”, so I opted to modify a language translation for both BuddyPress and WordPress MU.

When I was first researching how to do this, I was absolutely astonished at how misleading and vague documentation was regarding this. Forms regarding this topic were devoid of a direct approach on how to install these language files, in fact I was only able to figure out how to accomplish this by downloading different BuddyPress language installations and reading the original WordPress documentation. Hopefully this will save someone the pain and time of having to sift through various hints and tips and digging through documentation. Below is a direct approach on how to accomplish a simple translation for BuddyPress, this is not an in-depth tutorial and more information on WordPress translations can be found here.

1. First step is to download translation software, I myself chose poEdit since it has an OSX version. There are other editors avalable here from the WordPress site.
2. Download the official WordPress POT file and open it in poEdit.
3. Once open, save the file as en_US.po, opEdit will automatically create en_US.mo in the same directory.
4. Next step is to modify the buddypress.po file to your liking. Locate this file in your BuddyPress installation under /wp-content/mu-plugins/bp-languages/ and open it using poEdit.
5. Make the changes you want, for example I “translated” My Friends to My Contacts.
6. Save the file as buddypress-en_US.po, again poEdit should automatically create buddypress-en_US.mo in the same directory.
7. Log in to your WordPress MU admin page. Make sure the “American English” is selected in both Settings->General and Site Admin->Options.
8. Check your BuddyPress profile, My Friends should now read My Contacts.

Contrary to forms on the BuddyPress site, you do NOT have to edit your wp-config.php file, nor do you have to create a language directory in wp-includes. If you update your BP installation, make sure to check the new buddypress.po file to be sure no changes have been made from the previous version.