terrywassall.org work in progress

As mentionned in the previous post I spent some time editing the home.php file of the default theme of the WPMU installation but in the end decided to change the theme to Tarski for the main blog. This looks very nice. It hasn’t got the display of recently updated blogs but this is not an issue for the moment and I assume I would be able to achieve this with a plugin of some sort.

One of the Tarski options is to upload a custom header image. However, despite increasing file permissions to the apparently problematic directories, as identified in the error message below, I could not upload an image.

Unable to create directory …………../wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

I noticed that under Tarski options there is displayed a number of alternative headers pre-installed. I located the folder these were stored in and uploaded my custom header there using ftp. It was not listed and available for selection until I had also created and uploaded a 150×150 thumbnail for it with the required file name. Once this was done I could select the required custom header image and all was well. Perhaps uploading an individual custom header files using the custom header option doesn’t work with the theme in a WPMU installation. I have tried to do this with a test blog and it doesn’t work there either. If I can’t get this to work then users will only be able to use header iamges I have uploaded to the theme header folder.

I have spent some time playing with the home page of the default WPMU theme. It is a file called home.php in the themes/home/ folder. I made a copy of the original home.php which I renamed home-original.php just in case I messed up. The default home page displays recently updated blogs and an invitation to create a new blog, an option I have turned off. My edited version just removes the spurious text and links. Still looks pretty ordinary so will change it for one of the other themes I have now uploaded.

The default home page on installing WPMU is a little plain and one of the first things one might think about is changing to another more attractive theme. Apart from this it would be good to offer a reasonable range of themes to users for their own blogs. However, it seems not all WP themes work successfully with WPMU so it is essential to test them before activating them for other users. This is a short list of themes I have come across so far looking through the WPMU chapters in the book WordPress for Dummies, the WPMU Tutorials site, and WPMU.org.

http://tarskitheme.com/

http://cutline.tubetorial.com/

http://www.darrenhoyt.com/2007/08/05/wordpress-magazine-theme-released/

http://themasterplan.in/tma

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/10/20/cellar-heat-a-free-wordpress-theme/

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/doc

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/emptiness

We are currently playing with a WPMU+BuddyPress installation and I have discovered a theme that emulates to some extent the Ning community platform. This would be fantastic but it looks like it’s a paid for theme.

I’m slowly getting my head around WPMU. It looks like the original installation is a blog, of course, a sort of mother blog. In fact it is likely that WPMU could be used as a WCMS just like the ordinary WP with the option of not using the blog facility at all, or subordinating it to another page, and having a series of static pages with one of them as the home page. If this was installed in the web site root then a series of client blogs could be set up as pseudo subdomains. So, for instance, a WPMU web site could have a url like terrywassall.org with a blog and static pages but, as it is a WPMU installation lots of other blogs could created like user1.terrywassall.org and user2.terrywassall.org. I assume that WPMU woudl make just as good a WCMS as WP. Of course this would not be worth doing unless a number of client blogs were needed as well.

Up to now I assumed the only reason for registering a new account in WP without starting your own blog was so you can be a joint author for someone else’s. Playing about with my own WPMU installation reveals another possibility. If you register a new account as part of creating a new blog your blog name (the bit that ends up as part of the url) and your username will be the same. So if you create a new blog called testblog for instance and register as a new user your username will be testblog as well. However, once you have registered as a user you can create more new blogs and log into them with the same username and password (assuming the admin options allow this).

If, on registering a new account, you choose the create a user name only option and then log in to create a new blog you have bypassed the necessity of creating a blog with the same name as your username. Creating a new blog as an already registered user gives you frre choice of a blog name without it becoming a user name.

Once you have created more than your initial blog you have the option of changing the designation of your primary blog, by default the first blog you create. I assume if you do this it is possible to delete your original blog if you wish as your username is independent of any particular blog.

I created the first new blog in my WPMU installation by turning on the option to allow user and blog creation. I then logged off and went through the procedure for a visitor to create a blog. This worked fine. I then turned the option for creating additional blogs and users off.

The next step was to try creating a new blog manually as admin. I created a new blog and entered the same email as the first additional blog so that a new user would not be created. If I had entered an email address that was not already in the database apparently a new user would be created (presumably with the blog name – the bit that forms part of the blog url – as a user-name) and an activation email would be sent to that email address.

When I viewed the new blog I got the ‘not found’ page. When I logged out as admin and back in with the user-name and password of the new blog’s user I had the same problem. The new blog was listed under ‘My blogs’ but wouldn’t open. I logged back in as admin and deleted the new blog, went to the options page and turned on the option to allow user and blog creation. I then manually created a new blog and this time it worked fine. The lesson seems to be that the create blog option needs to be set to on for admin to manually create a new blog. If this is correct it is a bit of a pain as, if public blog creation is to be disallowed then the option will have to be turned on and off every time admin wants to create a new blog manually.

Day 2(6/11/09 17.13): Failure! Tried to create a new blog called testblog and expected to get a url 
terrywassall.org/blogs/testblog/. However the email sent to me with the activation link took me to testblog.terrywassall.org/blogs/ and when I clicked on it I got the Not found: The requested document was not found on this server page. Did I forget to choose the sub-directory option when I installed? I guess I’ll have to try again. Blast!

However, reported problem to Twitter and Andrea came up trumps again! Her reply said “make sure VHOST in config file is set to no.”  I remebered this is a line in the wp-config.php file that I had inspected yesterday to see what the installation script had produced. However, I was not able to edit it. The file was associated with a group and user called ‘apache’. Not sure what this means, but it certainly isn’t me. In the file VHOST was set to yes so needed changing. I got round this by copying wp-config.phpto another file with another name and editing it. I then renamed the original uneditable wp-config.php to something else (I was a bit surprised it let me do this) and renamed the edited copy to wp-config.php. I have no idea if this will have any unanticipated consequences. However, I created another new blog, testblog2, and the url returned to me in the email was terrywassall.org/blogs/testblog2/. When I clicked on the activation link all went well and when the following email arrived with a password I could log into the new blog. Fantastic!

I would like to thank Andrea for her generous help via Twitter. Two absolutely key pieces of information she shared with me undoubtedly saved me a lot of time and trouble. Next time I’m in your vicinity Andrea expect flowers, chocolates and one of my best jokes!

OK. Starting again. This time I’ll be a little less arrogant and do some research! I have deleted the blogs.terrywassall.org subdomain and the database and will install WPMu from scratch in a sub-directory, terrywassall.org/blogs/.  I’ll update this post with anything and everything that occurs. Any problems will be reported and, assuming I can solve them, where I got the information for the fix. I don’t know how useful this will be for others but it will be a full account of how it went for a comparative beginner so it might be.

Day 1 (5/11/09 23.05):  Created a sub-directory terrywassall.org/blogs/. Uploaded all the WPMu files and folders into it. That’s it for now. Before I do anything else tomorrow I will be looking at Installing in a subfolder on Andrea’s very useful WPMU Tutorials web site which I discovered today thanks to her response to my plaintive wailing on Twitter.

Day 2 (6/11/09 8.00): As warned in Installing in a subfolder, when going to terrywassall.org/blogs a message came up saying there is no wp-config file and a button inviting me to create one. This must be resisted! Don’t do it. Following the instructions I opened the wp-blog-header.php file and commented out lines 9 and 14 (not 24 as stated in Installing in a subfolder) to look as follows:

//       if ( !file_exists( dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-config.php’) && !file_exists( dirname( dirname   (__FILE__) ) . ‘/wp-  config.php’)) {
           if (strpos($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], ‘wp-admin’) !== false) $path = ”;
          else $path = ‘wp-admin/’;
           include( “index-install.php” ); // install WPMU!
          die();
//     }

On refreshing terrywassall.org/blogs/ a page appeared with an instruction to change the file permissions for a couple of folders to 777  - httpdocs/blogs and httpdocs/blogs/wp-content/. Once I had done this and refreshed again the installation form appeared. Now it was just a matter of filling the form in with the details of the database and database user I had created, choosing a name for the blog and supplying an email address. All the other fields I left as defaults but I noticed the server address was identified as terrywassall.org. I was tempted to add /blogs/to the end but didn’t. Surely the script knows best. On completing the form the installation was reported as having been successful and the admin password was displayed. This was also sent to the email address I had entered in the installation form. I clicked on the Log in button and found myself in the dashboard. So far so good.

However, on visiting the site the installation screen displayed again. I returned to the wp-blog-header.phpfile and uncommented lines 9 and 14 (as above) and on refreshing the browser the home page of the new installation opened. (There was a clue to this in Andrea’s post referenced above). Finally I returned httpdocs/blogs and httpdocs/blogs/wp-content/ to their previous file permissions.

Next task: try to create a new blog.

I attempted to install the multi-user version of WordPress in this domain today. You can see it at http://blogs.terrywassall.org. As you can see, rather than install in a directory, for instance terrywassall.org/blogs, I created a subdomain for the installation. All seemed to go well until I activated the option allowing visitors to register their own blog to see how and if this worked. It didn’t. I tried to register a blog with the user name ‘test’. This should have created a blog at test.blog.terrywassall.org. The email was delivered confiming the creation of the blog with a link to activate the blog. However, on doing so I get a ‘not found’ error message.

Two possibilites occur. One is that it looks as if WPMU is trying to create a subdomain in a subdomain. I didn’t realise this is how it would work and I chose the ‘subdomain’ option when installing as I thought this referred to the installation’s location, i.e. in a subdomain. It now seems this option tells WPMU to create a new subdomain for each blog. Perhaps this will only work if I install WPMU in the root – httpdocs in this case. This is probably the problem. The other information I have found is that if I want to use the subdomain option for blogs I need to add a wildcard record to my DNS records (whatever that means). I found this information in chapter 12, page 258, of WordPress for Dummies which I can heartly recommend. I need to add a hostname record pointing at my web server using  a DNS configuration tool. I don’t think I have access to one of these. Looks like I will have to email my ISP for help.

The alternative would be to do the installation in a directory or to dedicate a domain to it by installing in root rather than in a subdomain or a subdirectory.