For the past 3-4 days I have been testing GD Star Rating on WPMU with BuddyPress. So, this post will be about this testing and the things I have noticed so far. But let me tell from the start, latest 1.5.7 works just fine with MPMU & BuddyPress.
So, I have set WPMU 2.8.2 with BuddyPress 1.0.3 on localhost on Windows using XAMPP 1.7.1 I have installed GD Star Rating 1.5.7, and activated it site wide. I created 5 test blogs. At this point I was able to test administration panels GDSR adds, thumbs and standard ratings in both posts and comments. I will get to multi sets in the next few days.
So far almost everything works just fine. All admin panels are loading and work fine. At this moment dashboard widget with latest votes is not working properly. All plugin blog widgets are working fine. Widgets work if added to BuddyPress home page also. Standard single star element ratings are working in both posts and comments. The same goes with thumbs ratings. As far as I know all settings plugin needs and has, work as they should be working. Some functions I have tried to add to theme also worked fine.
But, there is one thing that’s not working as it should be because of the slightly different folder structure in wp-content for WPMU. Plugin creates additional gd-star-rating folder in wp-content, and this folder is used by all blogs on the site. It might not be the biggest problem because some things like cache will be shared and that is good, but things like stars sets, additional CSS and some other stuff are also shared and thats’ not good. This is the thing I will need to solve. Since I don’t have much experience with WPMU, I will need to read on the subject and find few resources on this.
One of the points that’s very important is tables in the database. Plugin creates 12 table. In WPMU environment that’s 12 tables per bog, and that’s more than number of tables WPMU creates per blog. But, there are many complex features plugin implements and they require a lot of different tables for storing data. Some users suggested that rating data goes in one set of tables for the entire site. But that’s simply a bad solution. If you have 100 blogs on the site, you will need all 100 blogs to use same sets of tables. As these tables grow all queries will get slower. Not to mention that I i would need to rewrite significant parts of the plugin, all SQL queries to add blog_id, and that could take too much time and in the end will cause slower response. Also, in many cases site tables is split on several databases and that will also cause problems. So, the current database/tables layout will remain the way it is now, and nothing will be changed in that regards. This works fine, there is no good reason to mess with that.
So, the WPMU/BP process has begun, and I would like to hear your thoughts on the subject. If you use the plugin already on WPMU please inform me of the problems and bugs you might found so far. But, it’s important to try using latest 1.5.7 so that we avoid reporting problems that are maybe solved by now. Also, let’s keep the comments in this post focused on WPMU/BP. I will spam all comments that are not on the subject. This is very important issue and it’s best to avoid wasting time and try to solve all problems as soon as possible.
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Code should look for variable values in it’s own table. Prefix use to be the slung name for the area (blog inside wpmu site).
$wpurl = get_bloginfo(‘wpurl’);
$area_url = str_replace(‘http://yourdomain/’,”,$wpurl);
$field_value = get_option($area_url.’_field_name’);
I will update GD Star Rating and make some test. I prefer not to install it site wide because don’t want to have ratings on buddy press home page or on members, grous, wire, etc. My choice was to activate it for each of my 6 blogs. Then I disable ratings for comments and ‘finger’. I also configure star number from 10 to 5. All this onfigurations were made repeteadly for each blog.
Best regards.
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Activating the plugin sitewide does not work for me. The only way I can get it to work it by activating it for all users using the Plugin Management plugin. The issue with this (and it may apply to sitewide activation) is that it gives users the ability to access their own GD Star tab.
I do not want this. I want to control the settings, style etc. for user.
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Well, centralized control is a very problematic issue at this moment. Something like this will require new plugin (or addition to this one) that will implement all the settings and serve them for each blog. The biggest problem is that I know very little about WPMU and I haven’t written WPMU specific plugins so far. For now my goal is to solve all problems with current plugin. Also, in the next 5-6 months WPMU will be gone, and merged with WP, and that may change things also.
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Although WMPU will be integrated into WP eventually, WMPU will still operate in pretty much the same way as far I know, it’s just that WP will have these options by default. Therefore, I think there will still be the issue of allowing users to access the GD Star plugin options.
Maybe you could get around this by hiding the plugin from view for all other users except the main admin blog e.g. hide plugin tab for all users except the user’s whose ID=1. You could then allows the main admin to edit the default plugin settings be it via the Settings panel or by editing the hard code. So when the plugin is activated on all blogs they will have the default ratings settings as chosen by the main admin and since the tab is hidden the users can’t change these settings.
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Yes, that’s a good idea, i it can be done much easier. I will add this to a list of changes for WPMU compatibility.
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Well done on this project for buddypress. Can you just adapt it for buddypress member themes for rating wire comments & buddypress plugins
just like facebook?
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Sorry, but I have almost no experience with BuddyPress. I don’t know exactly what all that means. Things I tried so far allow for widgets to be added to on the BP home page, but not much beyond that. I will need some time to familiarize with BP. Main priority right now is to make plugin work with WPMU, and than get to BP. Still, all BP comments are welcome, this is very important issue.
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FYI on buddypress doc for making plugins.
http://codex.buddypress.org/how-to-guides/creating-a-custom-buddypress-component/
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This would make buddypress CMS gd star feel like Facebook style..please we need it more than wpmu?
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Excellent.
I’m having trouble uninstalling GD Star (as I await the changes). I’ve deleted all relevant folders, deleted the database entries, I even removed the whole plugins folder. But it will not fully go, this remains on the plugin page: http://wrestleblogs.com/pic.png
Where else could this be coming from?
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That’s something wrong with WP. If you deleted folders and files, plugin can affect anything.
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Great to see you addressing WPMU and BuddyPress, thanks.
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ah imba !
i am waiting your results and i am agreeing to not giving settings to users. only multi-sets etc is enough. this plugin rocks with tons of settings but you will accept its nightmare for normal users.
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Hey Milan,
Got a bug report.
Using GDSR 1.5.7, WPMU 2.8.1 and BP 1.0.3.
On any Buddypress page, I get multiple warnings:
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in Z:\www\wp-content\plugins\gd-star-rating\gd-star-rating.php on line 741
Commenting out lines 741-743 fixes this problem.
Hope that helps.
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Thanx for reporting this. Fix will be in the next release.
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Hey Milan,
One other thing, in BuddyPress’ activity stream, if you leave a comment, the activity item will be listed as:
“Ray commented on the blog post Hello World”.
If you made a GD Star Rating “comment”, would it be possible to hijack the BuddyPress activity stream to say:
“Ray wrote a review for Hello World”?
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Ray:
You can temporarily solve this by disabling gd star rating in the home page.
Best Regards.
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Hey Milan,
Here to report another bug:
[Mon Aug 10 13:48:45 2009] [error] WordPress database error You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ” at line 1 for query update wp_1_gdsr_data_article set views = views + 1 where post_id = made by require, require_once, do_action, call_user_func_array, bp_core_do_catch_uri, load_template, require_once, get_header, locate_template, load_template, require_once, wp_head, do_action, call_user_func_array, HeadSpace2->wp_head, HeadSpace2->get_current_settings, HS_InlineTags->replace, HS_InlineTags->get_excerpt, apply_filters, call_user_func_array, GDStarRating->display_article, GDSRDatabase->add_new_view
Using GDSR 1.5.8 on WPMU 2.8.1 and BP 1.0.3.
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Some things are still not fully compatible with WPMU.
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