I haven’t yet got any response to my plea for help in the Elgg ‘Getting Started’ forum but after 30 minutes or so of browsing through earlier posts I think I have fixed the formatting, lack of css, problem. I found this referred to in an earlier post in this forum: http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/General_Troubleshooting. I turned the ‘simple cache’ off in site administration and immediately the formatting was fine! Turning the cache back on again immediately trashed the layout again. So I suppose I need to leave it off even though it says “Use simple cache (recommended)”
So all is well. I have registered a new user and the blogs work OK. Lots to learn about plugins and widgets and alternative layouts but looks very promising so far and will probably be worth the effort.
In the last post I reported that I tried to fix things by messing about with some of the settings and now couldn’t log in and I would delete the installation and start again. I have now tried to do this twice. The first time I just over-wrote the existing installation and deleted the .htaccess and engine/settings php files so the install script would have a fresh run at things. I left the existing db in place and hoped this would update if necessary. Needless to say it didn’t work. So I deleted this installation all over again but this time deleted and recreated the database and database user. I expect there is an easier way but this seemed to work. After uploading a fresh load of Elgg files again I set the necessary folder permissions for the install script to run ok and automatically create the settings and configuration files. The script ran, I entered the details, registered an admin account, logged in OK but the site is just the same as before – http://terrywassall.org/elgg/. B*****ks!
It’s as if the generated pages aren’t picking up any css or something. I still can’t find any references to this problem on the Web. I had no trouble installing WordPress, Moodle and phpBB. I had some initial problems installing WPMU but found and fix I needed with my first Google search a reference past onto me via Twitter supplied the rest. I will try posting a message to the Elgg forum.
Update: Posted the following message to the Getting Started group at Elgg.
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Hope this is the right place for this. I have just installed 1.6.1 following the installation instructions in the documentation area. All went as described until I got to the login page and into the site. No formatting or structure to the pages – http://terrywassall.org/elgg/. You’ll see what I mean if you look. Any ideas on what it is I need to do or have left undone? I have spent most of today searching for info on this and come up with nothing so far.
Whoops (update): after checking earlier messages in this discussion I tried changing to another view, choosing failsafe. Now I can’t log in or anything! I’ll look in the installation and db to see if I can change back to default view there. Any ideas gratefully received.
Further update: Sorry this is becoming a bit of a saga (appropriately enough). I found a line in the db where the view is specified, in the elggconfig table: view = s:8:”failsafe”;
I changed this back to view = s:8:”default”; and I can log in again. But still no formatting or layout, as if no css or anything else is being applied. I don’t like messing about in the database as I’m not sure what I’m doing.
As reported in the last post. I failed to install Elgg yesterday at http://terrywassall.org/elgg/. Since that post I tried to fix things by messing about with some of the settings and now I can’t log in! I shall be going for the equivalent of the ‘turn it off and on’ PC fix and so a complete reinstall ans start again.
Before that though I have tried another install in a subdomain of another web site I have – in elgg.terrywassall.net. This time I set up all the folder permissions so that the Elgg install script could create the necessary settings and configuration files automatically. This worked fine and all I had to do was fill in the database info and the path to the /data/ folder I had created. This is where things went wrong. The /data/ directory has to be created outside of the install path, i.e. in this case not in /httpdocs/, the document root of the subdomain. However, I found I did not have permissions to create folders at the same level as /httpdocs/. So I created it in /httpdocs/ and hoped for the best. I understand that you shouldn’t do this for security reasons. When I had filled in all the details required in the system settings form and clicked save I got an error message saying that the /data/ directory must be outside the installation path and that was that. I have now contacted my ISP and asked them to either give me permissions or to create the /data/ directory for me.
Attempted this evening to install elgg in http://terrywassall.org/elgg/. As you will see, there is no formatting and, although I am familiar with earlier versions up to 0.8, I cannot find how to find or change themes in the default installation. I assume it comes with at least 1 default theme. I understand themes are listed with plugins but there is nothing in the plugin list that sounds like a theme.
Up to this point installation went well. I downloaded and unzipped the files and used ftp to upload them into terrywassall.org/elgg/. I created a database and user as required. I created a data directory outside of the elgg root directory http://terrywassall.org/data/ and set the permissions asked for. Then I navigated to http://terrywassall.org/elgg/ and the install script ran as I had expected. I manually created the .htaccess and setting/engine.php files copying and pasting the text the installation script gave me. Then, on refreshing the browser to bring up the log in page I registered a user. According to the installation instructions the first user registered becomes the site admin. Having registered I logged in and enabled all the plugins that come with the install package. After spending an hour trying to work out if I could activate a theme and looking on the web for information I have given up for the evening. I’ll try again tomorrow and see if I can locate some help.
I’ve been trying to work out the best way for contributors to be able to post to our Public Sociology blog so that the public cannot see them but other logged in users can both read and comment as part of the editorial process. I found that posting as draft was no good as you could not add comments in preview. Preview is the only way of viewing a draft post. If you add comments and save the screen goes blank and the comment is not saved.
So at the moment the procedure I have recommended is to post as private. Commenting is then possible in the normal way and editorial comments will be deleted before a post is made public.
However, I then discovered this method of making draft posts commentable:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/296618 (many thanks to jberculo for posting this)
It involves changing a line in the wp-comments-post.php file.
do_action(‘comment_on_draft’, $comment_post_ID);
is changed to:
do_action(‘pre_comment_on_post’, $comment_post_ID);
and the following
exit;
is removed
I have tried this in the wp-comments-post.php for Public Sociology and it works fine. Comments can be added to draft posts. I copied the original wp-comments-post.php as wp-comments-post-original.php before making any changes.
The problem with this is that it is a hack and would have to be repeated if wp-comments-post.php is replaced during an upgrade. Is there a better way of doing this, a plugin perhaps?
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.
