Have you ever seen that scary “white screen of death” after upgrading? Maybe the auto-upgrading crapped out on you. Perhaps some of your plugins are conflicting with the upgrade. Here’s a quick way to disable all of your plugins at once, which will mostly likely allow you to log back into your installation and checkout what’s going on. Rename your /plugins/ folder and your /mu-plugins/ folder if using WPMU. This will automatically deactivate your plugins, because the database will assume they don’t exist. Then rename the folders back. You should be able to login and start activating them again. Yes, you can also do this directly through the database, but I think this way is much easier.

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Our readers often let us know that they just can’t get enough of BuddyPress, so today we’re going to take a look at a plugin you may not have heard about, as well as find out what some of the real BuddyPress ninjas are up to in the coming months.

BuddyPress Ninja Plugin

This is so far a little-known plugin, has only been downloaded only 44 times the last time I checked, but it’s quite handy for managing a BuddyPress site. After you install the plugin, you will have an extra menu item added to the BuddyPress menu bar called “Stealth Mode,” which is only for site admins. See the screenshot below:

When stealth mode is enabled the others users will not be able to see the “time ago” recently active information for the admin user. More admin tools may be added to this plugin in the future to make it a swiss-army knife suite of tools for BuddyPress admins. I’d like to see something like “invisible posting” added to the set of tools as well as the ability to remove all admin posts from the activity stream if desired.

This plugin was written by Francesco Laffi, author of the BuddyPress Album+ plugin, which has been downloaded over 5600 times. We try to stay up to date with Francesco Laffi, who is himself a BuddyPress ninja. His BuddyPress project was recently selected for the Google Summer of Code 2010. He’ll be mentored by Boone Gorges, another ninja whose work you should keep up with, and lead developer Andy Peatling. Francesco will be extending his BP-Album plugin to a complete media component as well as creating a moderation plugin. This is great news for the BuddyPress community and congrats to Francesco! We’ll be eagerly awaiting the next update on this project.

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Want to know if your theme is quality? Compare it against the ultimate theme developer’s checklist. Did you know that WordPress.org has such a checklist? Make sure to give it a glance if you’re developing a new theme and are prone to forget things like language support, print styles, and testing enclosures and videos. This is definitely a bookmarkable reference if you’re new to building WordPress themes. Going through this list may assist you in fixing a good number of bugs, especially if you don’t have beta testers to help you. This will save you time in the long run from having to offer hours of support for simple bugs that could have been fixed before the theme goes out.

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Everyone knows that ugly themes are a deal breaker when it comes to users selecting a blogging service, especially if you’re paying for that service. If you want to remain competitive in this market, whether you’re funded by advertising or by paid memberships, you must first offer decent themes and then have a way to display them to potential users to seal the deal.

Showcasing available blog themes for a WordPress Multi-Site or WPMU blog has always been somewhat of a pain. Ordinarily, if you want to showcase all your available themes, you need to gather their screenshots or create screenshots after having activated the themes yourself. Then you would need to upload them to a page and find a way to organize them. The ThemeBrowser plugin takes care of all of that for you. Many thanks to developer Chris Taylor for putting this together.

Features of ThemeBrowser:

• Easy to use shortcode implementation on pages or posts
• Displays details of the theme name, description and a large screenshot
• Only displays themes that have been activated by the admin
• Does not display themes without a screenshot
• Compatible with BuddyPress

Quick Review:

One thing that I like about this plugin is that it will automatically begin displaying the new themes you install, so that you don’t have to worry about creating a screenshot, sizing, and uploading the new image to the showcase. The only drawback in this plugin for me is the way the output is styled. The themes are listed one by one vertically down the page with the descriptions to the right, which leaves a a lot of white space on the page. When using this I would probably restyle it to be more like a gallery with two screenshots in a row with descriptions underneath. However, that’s a small price to pay for a plugin that let’s you drop all our themes into a gallery with a simple shortcode. Overall, I would definitely recommend using ThemeBrowser if you want to gain an advantage with users considering your WPMU blogging service. Your available themes will be a critical deciding factor for your user. With all of the blogging service options out there to choose from, showcasing your beautiful themes only makes sense.

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Quick Tip: When working with BuddyPress, bp-custom.php is a file that you create for all of your custom BuddyPress code. It gets loaded with all the rest of BuddyPress automatically during each page load. This file belongs in wp-content/plugins, not wp-content/plugins/buddypress. That can be confusing and may cost you some time if you’ve uploaded your changes to the wrong directory.

This tip was sent to us via Twitter by Mike Henderson (@mhendersonco), a web developer who works with WordPress. Follow him for more WordPress-related tweets!

Want to Submit a Daily Tip to WPMU.org?

If you’ve got a great tip for WordPress, WPMU, or BuddyPress users, send it our way on Twitter: @wpmuorg and we’ll happily credit you. Create a tweetable title and let us know if you have a more info or an article you’d like to link it to.

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The second tutorial in the customisation series over at BuddyDress was released today and takes you through how to ‘add a custom header image and resize the header’ of the Default BuddyPress 1.2 theme.

You can see more tutorial videos here and keep an eye out every week over at BuddyDress for a new tutorial. Remember to check the post out over at BuddyDress to get the written version of the video.

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You’ve probably heard about the BuddyPress language file, but maybe you’e never taken the time to find out how it works and how it can help you customize your community. If you’re creating a highly customized niche network with BuddyPress, then the language file is going to be one of your most important and time-saving tools. It allows you to change text sitewide without digging into all of the code.

What is a language file?

A language translation file is not for translating international languages. It is used specifically for changing various labels and messages in BuddyPress in such a way that you don’t have to hack the core files. Otherwise you’d have to hack quite a few core files to  customize BuddyPress labels, messages, and URL slugs.  Not only is that time-consuming; it’s just not good practice. 

How Can I Use the BuddyPress Language File?

You can find the BuddyPress language file in buddypress/bp-languages/buddypress.pot. Copy that file and rename it to a .po extension – ie. buddypress-mysite.po. Now you can start editing it in a text file with the help of the search and replace function. Make sure you remember this critical bit of information:

Do not edit the “msgid” entries.

Edit only the “msgstr” entries.

For example, let’s say you want to change the message your users receive when they create a password that doesn’t match:

#: bp-core/bp-core-settings.php:84
msgid "Your passwords did not match"
msgstr "Oh noes! Your passwords don't match. Try again!"

Simple, isn’t it? Let’s do one more example just for fun. This would be if you’re creating more of a business networking site and you’d like to change “Friend” to “Associate” Here’s how you would edit one of the entries:

#: bp-friends/bp-friends-templatetags.php:143
#: bp-themes/bp-default/_inc/ajax.php:343
msgid "Add Friend"
msgstr "Connect to Associate"

Of course, you’re going to have to change more “Friend” instances in that scenario, but it’s not difficult. When you’ve finally completed all the editing on your language file, there’s one more step to making it work.

How to Create the .MO File

Upload your .po language file to: wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-languages. Now you need to run a command from the command line inside this directory to tell your server to create the .mo file. Login as root using a program such as PuTTY for Windows or Terminal.app for Mac. Depending on your server’s file structure, you’ll want to CD to this directory:

cd /var/www/vhosts/mysite.com/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-languages

Now run the following command: msgfmt -o buddypress-mysite.mo buddypress-mysite.po

This will save the newly created .mo file in the /bp-languages/ directory for you.

Next step is to call the buddypress-mysite.mo file from wp-content/plugins/bp-custom.php like so:

define( 'BPLANG', 'mysite' );

if ( file_exists( BP_PLUGIN_DIR . '/bp-languages/buddypress-' . BPLANG . '.mo' ) ) {
    load_textdomain( 'buddypress', BP_PLUGIN_DIR . '/bp-languages/buddypress-' . BPLANG . '.mo' );
}

You’re done! Refresh your site and check out the changes.

When upgrading, if you use the automatic upgrade method to update BuddyPress, you should know that your custom language files will be removed. You’ll need to back those up before upgrading so that you can use them again. If you have any more questions, please ask in the comments or check out the BuddyPress Codex for more information.

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Feedback time

You remember that we were looking for video production… well we found some and we’d love to get your feedback on the resultant video!

It’s a 90 second-er that we’re hoping to put on the join page or front page… my question for you is…

… would it help persuade you to join up?

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Feedback time

You remember that we were looking for video production… well we found some and we’d love to get your feedback on the resultant video!

It’s a 90 second-er that we’re hoping to put on the join page or front page… my question for you is…

… would it help persuade you to join up?

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Did you know that you can change the settings for post revisions and WordPress’ autosaving of posts within your wp-config.php file? Who really needs a million post revisions anyway? This will help you to cut down on how much is stored in your database. Below are examples for editing your wp-config.php file to change the number of post revisions stored in your database or completely disable them, as well as change how often your posts autosave.

define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 120 );  // seconds (default is 60)
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false ); // disable post revisions
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3); // alter number of post revisions kept.

Source: Dave Redfern

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