Image Credit: Alan(ator)’s “Solar System Disco Ball Mobile”
That’s right, UMW Blogs now has all the BuddyPress features fully operational, take a look for yourself at the blogs directory, members directory, groups directory and profiles. This is very eciting for a wide range of reasons, and we couldn’t have done it without the great, potentate D’Arcy “Bike Pants” Norman, particularly his post here which illustrates how to get BuddyPress working with the Multi-DB setup—which had been holding us up for a couple of weeks now. Now, I’m sure this issue will be updated in the forthcoming version of Multi-DB, but this fix allows us to push ahead with our development plans for BuddyPress on a much quicker timeline. So, once again the folks in the edtech network prove to be invaluable in the clutch. I’d share a foxhole with D’Arcy, and I just might at OpenEd 🙂
OK, but for documenting purposes I am going to explain the issues I had with getting this working—which should illustrate my ignorance clearly. In the Multi-DB environment he BuddyPress tables where actually installed in a database other than the Global DB, which is where they belong, but I had no idea where. Well once I searched them out I finally found them in database d (which is one of 18 possible databases) and followed D’Arcy’s directions from there and everything went smoothly.
Now, once I set everything up it worked like charm except for the blogs directory which was throwing this error:
Fatal error: Unsupported operand types in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core.php on line 985
We thought it might be linked to plugins or themes, but it is probably related to older blogs problem “that don’t have a ‘last_updated’ blogmeta entry” according to Andy Peatling—whose word I trust 🙂 So, I submitted a bug report, and I imagine this will only effect blog communities that have been established for a while and have a number of blogs that haven;t been updated for a while. So, in the meantime, Martha had the idea to go into the bp-themes/bpmember/directories/blogs/blogs-loop.php and bp-themes/bpmember/directories/blog/index.php and comment out the line of code calling for last_updated around line 21 of blogs-loop.php and roughly on line 79 of the index.php file in the same directory, if not just look for the line of code with this call bp_the_site_blog_last_active()
OK, now to hack and integrate BuddyPress into UMW Blogs like it was my job!
