[ZKuJoe]

Thanks for the feedback and the link to the plugin but I don’t want it to look or feel like a blog, just act like a blog. I prefer the thread/post structure over the entry/comment structure. I was originally using WordPress and had a MyBB forum on the same site, then I switched over to just a MyBB forum with a Blog plugin, but then found that bbPress felt like both a blog and forum without requiring different installations to achieve both. I just created certain categories that only I could post in (the “My” areas) for my “blog areas” and the rest are open for free discussion.

I am working on getting the first post of the latest topic to appear on the front page but I have to many other development projects on my plate at the moment.

[johnhiler]

“Shared-hosts are the bread and butter of WordPress usage. The good news is servers are way more powerful than when I wrote the first bbPress, and we can take advantage of that to provide a richer experience.”

This is definitely true. It’s kind of the Microsoft approach: grow the OS core, and lean on the hardware handle the growing codebase. It works for smaller sites that don’t hit scaling limits and for larger sites that can afford bigger hardware.

“The uncertainty of testing the interactions of N factorial plugins is daunting and gets untenable quickly.”

Plugin interaction is definitely a concern. But in practice, I have rarely if ever had plugins conflict with each other.

“Better to draw a line in the sand and promise the user ‘these things will always work together.'”

I think the “promise” model depends on having a large and growing team of developers actively managing the core. That hasn’t been the case in the past, so moving stuff into the core has actually slowed down development of the platform quite a bit. Perhaps things will be different in the future…

In any case, even with developers available to help build up the core – I’d still prefer to have a model that embraces plugin developers, and then has specific plugins blessed as official branches. This is where more social forms of source control like GitHub may be better than Subversion; plugins wouldn’t be dependent on just one developer, since anyone can seamlessly create and post a new branch. It’s much more like the pastebin stuff that’s constantly going on here in the bbPress forums.

Thanks for the reply!

John

[Matt Mullenweg]

Shared-hosts are the bread and butter of WordPress usage. The good news is servers are way more powerful than when I wrote the first bbPress, and we can take advantage of that to provide a richer experience.

I like the idea of plugin-centric development from a theoretical point of view, and obviously plugins have been at the core of WordPress’ success, but I think it can be taken too far and take away from the user experience.

It’s about taking responsibility. Even though you could break down almost every feature of WordPress into a plugin and distribute everything bundled, and even activate a bunch of them by default I think you lose a “buck stops here” for other developers to target. The uncertainty of testing the interactions of N factorial plugins is daunting and gets untenable quickly.

Better to draw a line in the sand and promise the user “these things will always work together.”

[kevinjohngallagher]

Ok mate, first thing to test is, if you specify an ID, do you get an image.

eg: bb_get_avatar(1);

If so, aweosome. then we’ve narrowed down the problem to the ID we’re passing.

i’d also add this line:

echo $topic->topic_last_post_id;

and see what that outputs. (should be a number).

[John James Jacoby]

Thinking part of the JS minify issue may have been not emptying the cache after changing the settings. Before I wasn’t automatically uploading the changes to the CDN.

Seems to be fine now, and can’t duplicate it when I want to see it.

If you really want it minified, I’m happy to get the plugin author involved in testing, to see if it’s a w3tc or bbPress issue.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I can shed some light on that.

Matt, I apologise in advance for this; but the constant slog in using this website in the months since the “bbpress2.0” theme release has been very tough. Did you know the homepage was a 404 for almost a week? And text was under 8px if you weren’t on a Mac or Linux. Patches and Changes were uploaded, changes not tested. We’ve a 6 page thread on it somewhere (it was sticked in the last 48 hours).

Anyway, the worst of those bugs meant that all HTML was parsed without exceptions (it wasn’t added to BackPress), so for just under 8 weeks, every single line of code we type into this forum has been converted to lots of & lts; and & gts; etc. It’s made giving solutions… difficult. Especially when copy/pasting. Especially for non PHP people.

Someone fixed the bug and added the fix to BackPress, but no-one picks up on the BackPress trac / forums (was bumped for 5 weeks) and no mails in the mailing list by a developer for almost 16 weeks. Eventually I reached out to Westi, who was awesome (no surprise really), and he stepped up and applied the patch (actually a few patches for us). It took another 13 days for it to be applied to this website. (I am also confident he’s now v easily contactable for everyone about backPress)

I ain’t intending on dredching up the past man, just… I know there’s some “ill will” around right now. Its not about “5 years of pent up anger” or anything like you said in the other post, it’s about last week, last month, the month before that etc.

With no intention of starting a long debate, would you have let the WordPress.org homepage be a 404 page for almost a week?

If no-one could give code exmaples on the WP.org support forums, would that have lasted from May to July?

We all drop the ball dude, its life, but if you wanted bbPress to help itself, it did. Ok, so not brilliantly or specacularly but it’s the dependancies placed upon us let us down, and the people we depended on were too busy making publicly disparaging comments at their WordCamp KeyNote speeches.

I often wonder if objectively you’d look at this post and think how you’ve done with bbPress: http://ma.tt/2009/08/kill-your-community/

I’m really glad you’re here and I’m thankful for your tone. I’m thankful for the information you’re giving. I, and I’m sure many others, are ok with us disagreeing on things, it’s the uncertainty coupled with the lack of respect (WordCamp comment + this website constantly breaking) thats stoked the flames of discontent.

In honesty bro, fair crack of the whip + information to make up our own mind = happy + repsectful community.

P.S. Sorry for the WTFmatt person. and haha, someone will be along to apologise for me in a minute

[John James Jacoby]

Spent the past week or so testing a few larger BuddyPress/bbPress installations with W3TC, and I can say that it works a treat with the bundled version of bbPress we tuck in there too.

Experienced the same JS minify on the inline JS also actually. Wonder if it’s a bug. I’ll see what I can dig up.

[_ck_]

Ah, your server has some kind of security option that does not allow code to execute directly from chmod 777 directories.

The first option would actually work better as far as not knowing the real directory or if you ever changed servers or directory names

ie. $browsertimer['log']=dirname(__FILE__).'/browsertimer.log';

Sorry this took so long to get going for you but don’t forget to work on why the queries are so high, that’s far more important.

[pastorbobsforum]

Well, now this is…interesting.

I uploaded the test.php

After http://pastorbob.limewebs.com/my-plugins/browser-timer/test.php

I get this: `Internal Server Error</p>

<p>Directory “(removed for security)/pastorbob.limewebs.com/my-plugins/browser-timer” is writeable by group`

Which had one good thing to it: it gave me my server directory.

But anyhow, after that I tried again the http://pastorbob.limewebs.com/?browsertimer I discovered that is working, without the extra modification that you’ve suggested.

Simply $browsertimer['log']=dirname(__FILE__).'/browsertimer.log'; and it worked.

I obviously modified the line to $browsertimer['log']='(removed for security)/pastorbob.limewebs.com/my-plugins/browser-timer/browsertimer.log'; and it worked just as well.

Now, my uneducated conclusion was that as long as I had one file called browsertimer.log in my entire forum folder the two expression would output the same result. The 2nd on the other hand is the best one.

What would your conclusion be?

Thank you anyway.

Regards,

Bob

[_ck_]

Oh and it just dawned on me.

If you have an empty log (ie. no visitors) you’ll always get an open log error.

So be sure to load the front page as a test first.

[_ck_]

Okay let’s assume the host is doing something weird.

Make a temporary file in the same directory that you want the log to be.

ie. test.php

put this in the file

<?php echo __FILE__; ?>

Then access it from the web, ie. example.com/my-plugins/browser-timer/test.php

Whatever it shows you, change the ending test.php part to browsertimer.log

and then put it inside

$browsertimer['log']='full line here';

Now that has to work, as long as the my-plugins/browser-timer/ directory is chmod 777.

[pastorbobsforum]

I have deleted the .log file. I’ve made the modifications in browser-timer.php

$browsertimer=dirname(__FILE__).'/browsertimer.log';

The weird thing is that I can no longer see the .log file being created and I get the same log open error

My permissions on the folder are 777, as I said before.

Another thing is that I am getting a 550 Permission Denied in Filezilla when I try chmod, but it’s ok in their filemanager. Even Filezilla tells me that I have 777.

Any other ideas?

Bob

[_ck_]

Yeah problem was solved – sometime in the past week the code bug was fixed, I have no idea exactly when or by whom but was going to point it out until I tested it.

Unfortunately it did not clear up existing posts that were already html-entitied by the bug an example or two (but it even happened inside of backticks too)

I kinda don’t want to get into WP politics here (we’ve got enough of our own problems) but you can’t count downloads by existing users anymore who are terrified of being hacked because they didn’t keep up with the newest release.

I was looking into having some reindeer paraded by your door (10 “bucks” get it?) but I was afraid you’d BBQ them and send me a photo or something like that

[_ck_]

Your server must have some fancy virtual host mapping.

By the way I just noticed you said this “I created a file called browsertime.log”

delete that file you made because it may have permissions that PHP cannot modify for some reason depending on your host – let the PHP code make the file

Well we can take the lazy way out:

$browsertimer['log']=dirname(__FILE__).'/browsertimer.log';

That should almost certainly work and be right in the plugin directory.

[pastorbobsforum]

Hello again.

I cannot get it to work yet. Jolly well!

So, my Filezilla path is: /pastorbob.limewebs.com/my-plugins/browser-timer/

But my FTP is ftp://ftp001101.limedomains.com/pastorbob.limewebs.com/my-plugins/browser-timer/

I have changed this to what you’ve told me: $browsertimer['log']=$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/pastorbob.limewebs.com/my-plugins/browser-timer/browsertimer.log'

Then I’ve tried the other option as well: $browsertimer['log']=$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/ftp001101.limedomains.com/pastorbob.limewebs.com/my-plugins/browser-timer/browsertimer.log'

I thought that I might have been on to something. But I wasn’t.

Thank you for your help, again!

Regards,

Bob

[Satish]

I will check out the cookie thing and post here again.

I am using WordPress 3.0 and bbpress 1.0.2, on a test site and I am facing the exact same problem as outlined by @jmharrington.

_ck_, I have another question, for which I don’t want to open another thread – because people may get annoyed.

I read this whole – “bbpress as standalone v/s plugin”, instead of understanding things, after some point of reading things, I got confused. I am so confused now to whether I need to wait till the plugin is released or can I go ahead and install present release? The problem is, I want to know – if I will be able to upgrade to plugin version later easily without loosing the current thread entries, users etc. ?

I tested almost all the forum software available and have settled with bbpress because its easy for users to understand and use.

[_ck_]

By the way, your site is using 69 queries on the front page, that is VERY very bad. Something is wrong. It’s probably not loading all your options at once and some other issues that 1.0 has.

You probably should be focusing on bb-benchmark instead of this plugin.

Also make sure you install this mini-plugin to try to reduce the queries:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/heres-how-to-fix-some-of-the-10-query-performance-regression

[kevinjohngallagher]

It’s a combo of SEO and HCI.

Having a different title for each page makes life easier for humans, as well as not being bad for SEO.

In the strictest sense, Google (et al) state that every page should have it’s own and unique title, and if relative should be linked with a canonical link.

(though, there is no doubt that they’re clever enough to work it out).

[_ck_]

Ah, you almost have the log location concept but not quite.

I am going to assume you are trying to put the log file in the same directory as the plugin. I really don’t advise this at all for security reasons but if you are just doing short term testing and will delete it later it could be temporarily acceptable.

So, in that case my-plugins/browser-timer/ must be chmod 777

(the sub-directory /browser-timer/ I mean)

Now is the path to the file really

/pastorbob.limewebs.com/my-plugins/browser-timer/browsertimer.log'

Because that doesn’t seem quite right. I see it’s off a subdomain but still, I’ll not certain.

Try changing

dirname($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'])

to just plain

$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']

(don’t forget leave the dot afterwards)

If that doesn’t work, what’s the full path to my-plugins/browser-timer/ that you see in your FTP program (if it hopefully shows the full path). If not, we can take a peek at phpinfo.

What I’d really rather see is you putting the log in a subdirectory ABOVE your web root (aka Document Root).

But give that a try for now and let me know.

[pastorbobsforum]

Hello.

I have an account on limedomains.com

My home directory is pastorbob.limewebs.com

So, I figured that this should be my setting in browser-timer.php

$browsertimer['log']=dirname($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']).'/pastorbob.limewebs.com/my-plugins/browser-timer/browsertimer.log';

I set the permission for browser-timer to 777.

I created a file called browsertime.log

But when I go to http://pastorbob.limewebs.com/?browsertimer , I get log open error

Is it just me?

Regards,

Bob

[_ck_]

I’ve just tested bbPress 0.9 with WP 3.0’s cookies and the Freshly Baked Cookies plugin DOES work properly.

Just make sure your cookie paths for WordPress and bbPress are pointing the same place (ie. /) which was always required for proper integration anyway and is not done by the plugin but inside wp-config and bb-config – see the numerous integration guides around bbpress.org

Make certain you are using version 0.0.4 of the plugin or higher which supports the newer kind of WordPress cookies in use since WP 2.8

[Ashish Kumar (Ashfame)]

I am with you _ck_

I would love to see bbPress 0.9 becoming as one of the best choice for standalone forum script.

[Matt Mullenweg]

At least if it’s the same _ck_ as here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440574

But in lieu of cash I will accept some testing on 1.1.

[_ck_]

This utility has been delayed a bit as a few things came up this weekend but I fully intend to finish it soon.

Thanks for volunteering citizenkeith, I’ll keep you posted.

[citizenkeith]

I’d love to help out. I’m capable of backing up my database and restoring it. :