WP Symposium: Admin Guide (English Edition)
WP Symposium: Admin Guide (English Edition)
WP Symposium: Admin Guide (English Edition)
www.wpsymposium.com
WP Symposium
Admin Guide [English edition]
Covers up to Version: 0.43 Author: Simon Goodchild Dated: 27th February 2011
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WP Symposium!
www.wpsymposium.com
Table of Contents
Installation
Automatic installation ! Manual installation/upgrade!
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Activating WP Symposium
What is each plugin for ? !
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6 7 8 8 8 10
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WP Symposium Options
Notes! Settings! Forum! Prole! Panel !
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Styles Menu
Included Style Templates! Disabling the Styles! Changing the Styles!
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Widgets
Latest New Members! Latest Forum Posts! Yes/No Vote!
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Troubleshooting
Try this rst! Buttons dont work, cant post, etc..!! Other problems?!
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Legal Stuff
Copyright! Distribution! Donations! Use WordPress!
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Installation
Automatic installation
WP Symposium is best installed from within your current WordPress installation. Login as the administrator and click on Plugins -> Add New. This will present you with a screen that allows you to search WordPress plugins. Note: you must be connected to the internet when you do this! To install WP Symposium, type wp symposium in the search box and click on Search Plugins. This will show you a list of plugins that match, or mention, WP Symposium - look for the plugin that is simply called WP Symposium. When you hover your mouse of that row of the results, and Install link will appear, click on it and WP Symposium will be downloaded and installed.
Manual installation/upgrade
If you are doing a manual installation, or manually upgrading, then download the ZIP le from with the WordPress website at http://www.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-symposium. If you are happy to accept the risks of doing so, at times a pre-release of the next public release is available from the download page on www.wpsymposium.com. Extract the contents of the ZIP le over the top at wp-content/plugins/wp-symposium (your exact path may differ depending on your installation). Important! De-activate and re-activate the WP Symposium Core plugin after doing a manual installation/upgrade.
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Activating WP Symposium
Once WP Symposium is installed, click on Plugins in the menu and you will see a number of WP Symposium plugins. There are several, each that provide functionality that you can choose to activate, or not. For now, the assumption is that you may want all the plugins, so if any are not activated, click on the activate link for each one. Below shows all plugins activated, apart from the last one (which will be activated when the Activate link is clicked on):
If you have problems with WP Symposium, it is always worth de-activating, and re-activating the core WP Symposium plugin. Also, check on the Health Check page (under Symposium in the WordPress menu) as any problems with your installation may well be highlighted there.
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Plugin
WP Symposium WP Symposium Forum WP Symposium Prole (now also incorporates the previous avatar plugin)
Function
Core code, this must be activated at all times. A forum/message board for online discussion. Provides extended member features: a member home page a wall for posting messages and replying allows friends to be requested and accepted additional member information personal preferences for the site upload a prole picture (avatar)
Allows members to send and receive mail within the site. A searchable list of members. Live information on mail and friends requests Notications on received mail, friends requests and friends activity Live chatting with other members Chat room for all site members A growing number of widgets that provide features and functionality for WordPress sidebars (or other places that accept Widgets).
WP Symposium Widgets
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For WP Symposium to operate correctly, you have to tell it on which WordPress pages you have each plugin installed. You can actually put each plugin on more than one page, but you have to have at least a single main page. For example, if you are going to let members access their mail via http://www.example.com/ mail then, in the options page you will need to ll in the appropriate eld with http:// www.example.com/mail. In other words, you need to do a little bit of planning when rst setting up WP Symposium, although you can change these at any time. You will probably start by adding some pages to your WordPress website for WP Symposium features and functionality.
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To add pages, use the Pages -> Add New menu item and add at least the following information as a minimum: [1]! The title of your new page.
[2]! This is important, its the permalink, or URL of your webpage, what visitors to your site will type - or what youll put in any hyperlinks to go to this particular page. Youll also need this when you set up your options in the next section! [5]
[4]
[3]! On your page you need to put in a short-code. This short-code will literally be replaced by the plugins functionality and features. For a list of the short-codes available, please see later in this document. [4]! Although the WP Symposium plugins should work in any WordPress theme, must of the plugins will look better if you can use them with enough space, or width, on the page. If you can select a template that doesnt show the sidebar, for example, the mail and forum plugins will look better. Alternatively, you can use theme templates that allow the user to have width - right across the browser - rather than limited to a xed width template. [5]! Its up to you whether you allow comments on your page, but more often than not it would probably be best not to. A forum with comments at the bottom of it, would look rather odd!
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In our example, we put the short-code [symposium-mail] on our page that members will use to access mail messages and/or send mail to other members. Remember point [2] where we set the permalink or URL? Its that value that you will put in the elds beside Mail URL. So for our page we would put http://www.example.com/messages. For your website it may be something like http://www.example.com/mail (depending on how you set up the page). Remember it can be anything you want, all the following are reasonable examples: http://www.example.com/privatemail http://www.example.com/messages http://www.example/com/mail If you were using other plugins, on other pages, you would following the same process. For example, if you have a page for your forum, which has a permalink set as http:// www.example.com/forum - this is what you would put beside the Forum URL. This URL is the main page on which your members will access these plugins. You can actually have them on more than one page, but you must enter at least one of them here.
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The short-codes that you have available as part of WP Symposium is as per the following table. Please note that: there are no spaces they are square brackets at the start and end it is a hyphen in the middle, not an underscore Full Functionality Short-codes
Plugin
WP Symposium Forum WP Symposium Prole (Wall) WP Symposium Prole (Extended info) WP Symposium Prole (Friends Activity) WP Symposium Prole (All Activity) WP Symposium Prole (Settings) WP Symposium Prole (Personal) WP Symposium Prole (Friends) WP Symposium Prole (Avatar) WP Symposium Mail WP Symposium Members Directory
Short-code
[symposium-forum] [symposium-prole] [symposium-extended] [symposium-activity] [symposium-all] [symposium-settings] [symposium-personal] [symposium-friends] [symposium-avatar] [symposium-mail] [symposium-members]
Partial Functionality Short-codes This short-codes are for use by those more advanced site admins who want to create page with partial functionality.
Plugin
Show the Prole page menu Show the Prole page member header
Short-code
[symposium-menu] [symposium-member-header]
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[symposium-member-header] <div style='width:170px; float:left;'> [symposium-menu] </div> <div style='float:left;width:700px;'> <h1>Support Forum</h1> [symposium-forum] </div>
PHP
symposium_members('bar')
Provides
small member search bar
For example, the following is a snippet from the header.php in the theme used on the www.wpsymposium.com website:
<div id="access" role="navigation"> <?php /* Allow screen readers / text browsers to skip the menu and get right to the good stuff */ ?> <div style='float:right; font-size:13px;'><a href='/'><?php bloginfo( 'name' ); ?></a></div> <div style='float:right; font-size:13px;'>
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Global
Mail Friends online Chat windows Chat room Personal information Preferences (settings) Prole photo Wall / Activity Forum
Site-Specic
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WP Symposium Options
Clicking on the Symposium -> Options menu item will bring up a series of tabs. The number of tabs, and which tabs are displayed, depends on which WP Symposium plugins you have activated.
Notes
A information only screen - informing you of the version number you have installed, which plugins are activated and a personal note from Simon Goodchild - the creator of WP Symposium. If the version displayed (in the Version Numbers box to the right) is different to that shown on the plugins page, try deactivating and then re-activating the WP Symposium Core plugin. This should synchronise the versions, and apply the latest database changes.
Settings
Label
Forum URL Mail URL Prole URL Members Directory URL
Purpose
The full web address (URL) of the WordPress page on which you have put the [symposium-forum] short-code. The full web address (URL) of the WordPress page on which you have put the [symposium-mail] short-code. The full web address (URL) of the WordPress page on which you have put the [symposium-prole] short-code. The full web address (URL) of the WordPress page on which you have put the [symposium-members] shortcode.
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Label
Images in database
Purpose
If checked, images uploaded are stored in the database, otherwise they are uploaded to the lesystem. If you select lesystem, you will also need to set the following two options, otherwise they are not shown. DO NOT CHANGE THIS ONCE WPS IS LIVE The advantage of using the lesystem is that it minimises the size of the database. The disadvantage is that all uploaded images are available to anonymous browsing, if the URL of the image is known (although this could also be an advantage if you want to share links to individual photos, for example). The advantage of using the database is that, should you wish to, you could scale up your website to use multiple webservers and/or a database server(s), i.e. an n-tier infrastructure. The disadvantage of using the database is that some hosting companies may throttle the use of databases, possibly add additional charges and may have restrictions.
Images directory
The path on the server to the folder where images will be stored. WPS will default this when the core plugin is activated for the rst time, but you can change it. DO NOT CHANGE THIS ONCE WPS IS LIVE The path will be different for different servers, but will be something like path-to/wp-content/wps-content. The admin page will try and create this folder, but if permissions do not allow, you may need to create it manually. Be sure to set permissions such that les can be moved into the folders, and deleted.
Images URL
The URL to the images - not the server path. For example, the default value will be /wp-content/wpscontent. DO NOT CHANGE THIS ONCE WPS IS LIVE
The text that is automatically added to the bottom of every email generated by WP Symposium. As a percentage (eg: 99%) or in pixels (eg: 500px), the width applied to all WP Symposium plugins.
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Label
Alignment
Purpose
Whether WP Symposium plugins align on the page to the left, in the centre or to the right.
If you are having problems with plugin clashes, i.e. errors that are appearing because a WP Symposium plugin is activated along with another plugin, the following settings should all be disabled, and then enabled one at a time until the clash is identied.
Label
Load jQuery Load jQuery UI
Purpose
If activated, jQuery will be loaded on all non-admin pages. If activated, jQuery UI will be loaded on all non-admin pages. This is a custom version of the jQuery UI code, including only those features required by WP Symposium. If other plugins include a greater number of features, then you can deactivate the loading of jQuery UI. In the forum, links within automatically include the title of the forum post if this option is enabled. This is good for search engine rankings, but can caused problems if other SEO improvement plugins are also activated. Automatically replaces all smilies and emoticons with a graphical equivalent. For example: :) becomes {{good}} becomes For a full list, go to http://www.wpsymposium.com/ support/smilies-emoticons
Smilies / Emoticons
Enable Redirects
By default, after logging in, or logging out, you will be taken to previous page you were at. However, if you enabled this option you can choose where the user will go after logging in, and after logging out. This is particularly useful if, for example, you want users to go straight to their wall, or personal settings after logging in.
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Forum
Label
Moderation
Purpose
If activated, a site administrator has to approve (or reject) every new post or reply before it appears on the forum. The site administrator is sent an email when a post/reply is awaiting approval/rejection. The menu will also show how many are awaiting a decision, as show to the left (in the title, and beside Forum Posts). The author of the post/reply will see it on the forum, but with [pending approval] after the title/text. When the post/reply is approved/rejected, the author receives an email informing them of the decision.
Daily Digest
If enabled will send a summary report of all forum activity each day (sent when the site is rst accessed after midnight). Members can choose to disable receiving the daily digest email on their prole preferences page (requires prole plugin to be activated).
Categories
Enable to organise forum topics into categories. If enabled, categories are managed via the Forum Categories menu item, as shown to the left. Categories can be arranged in order, and set to allow or disallow new topics by users. Not allowing new topics will allow the administrator to set up a category as a set of Frequently Asked Questions (for example).
Enable to include forum views when logged in as administrator in the total views count. Older rst, or newest rst in the list of replies shown for a topic. How many characters are shown in the preview text for forum topics, and forum replies.
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Label
View forum level
Purpose
The minimum level a member has to be, to be able to view the forum. If you want your forum private for members only, dont select Guest.
Closed word
So that the forum can be used for support purposes, and show closed topics, you can set a word that, if it appears in the topic title, causes that topic to be opaque. For example, enter closed for [closed] to cause the effect. At the top of an individual topic you can show as many of the sharing icons as you want by ticking them here. Un-tick them all not to allow forum topic sharing. Sharing allows your members to post a message on Facebook, for example - spreading links back to your forum on other common social networking sites.
Managing Forum Categories Via the menu item, you can add categories, delete them and change their order:
You can also set whether a category allows new topics to be added by users, and what the default category will be for new forum topics. If you start your forum, and then introduce categories at a later date, you will be shown a list of posts that need to have a category chosen for them. It is highly recommended that you set your strategy early, or else you may end up with a lot of posts to categorise!
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Profile
Label
Prole Photos
Purpose
If activated (which it is by default), members can upload a prole photo (avatar) to be used by WP Symposium. If not activated, then the default WordPress member avatar will be used (normally fed from gravatar.com). By default a sub-menu is shown on the prole page. If you want to use your own navigation with the appropriate short-codes, then you can switch this off. You can include the members prole information and recently active friends down the right of the wall posts and replies. Sites with a narrow template, or those that show the sidebar, may prefer to disable this option.
Many WordPress site administrators have other plugins that they use to allow members to manage their passwords, or simply dont want members to be able to change their passwords. Disable to hide the change password option on the Prole Preferences page.
Inactivity Period
How many minutes, after which a member is assumed to be off-line (not an active user of the website) and logged out (not used the website for some time). These values are used with the WPS Panel plugin, to show the status of the members, and with the members directory plugin.
Extended Fields
To customise your members prole page, you can add extended meta information. For example, if you were running a website on scuba diving, you would probably want your members to list their level of qualication, how many dives theyve done and so on. If you were running a dating website, then marital status and so on would be more appropriate.
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Extended Fields You can add as many extended elds as you like. However, if you change a eld name at a later date, your members will lose all previously entered information - plan your extended elds with care. You can set default values for drop down lists, where you want to set the possible values yourself, enter all the possible values in the default value eld, separated by commas. The rst item on your list will be the default value until another is selected. Members do not have values stored against their extended elds until they save their prole. Fields with no values are not shown on the prole page.
Panel
The panel is an area at the bottom-right of the screen where members are informed of unread mail, new friend requests, and how many friends are online, access to the chatroom and a logout icon. Via the box that shows whether their friends are online or not, they can click on a friends name and a live chat box will open up on their screen - and on their friends screen.
Label
Show to Visitors Label Default sound alert * Enable chat windows Enable chat room
Purpose
Enable to show the bar to visitors, on which a login and register link will be shown. Optional text shown to the left of the bar. The sound that plays when new mail, a new friend request, etc arrives. Whether to enable real-time live chat windows. Activate the site-wide chat room for all members. Not all chat is visible to all members. Administrators can clear the chat using the link on chat room window title bar.
A comma separated list of words that are will be replaced by *** if used in the chat room.
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Label
Chat purge age Polling Intervals
Purpose
Every night a old chat messages are removed from the database. This setting is how many days should be kept. 1.How frequent in seconds the notication bar checks for new mail, new friend requests and friends online status. 2.How frequent in seconds the live chat checks for additional comments/replies It is very important to set the polling intervals to match your hosting server/environment. If you set them too frequent, you may get performance issues. It is recommended that you do not set the intervals less than 120/10.
Prole link
Should the members name link to the WordPress prole page (if disabled, and the prole plugin is activated, the link will go to the prole page - if not deactivated, then there will be no link.
* Members can change this on their prole preferences page (assuming prole plugin is activated).
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Styles Menu
You can modify a lot of the design of WP Symposium plugins through this menu item. It allows you to match the overall style of your website without knowing about Stylesheets. To pick a colour, click on the colourful circle as shown to the right.
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Uploading images
As is discussed in the previous section covering the Settings page (please refer to it again if you have not read it), you have the choice of uploading images to the database or the le system. If you nd that you cant upload images on the Health Check page, you can try the alternative method. The more common problems are:
Problem
Files cant be uploaded Files cant be moved/copied
Suggestion
upload_tmp_dir may not be set in PHP.INI Permissions may be restricting PHP functions, you may need to CHMOD (change the permissions) of certain folders yourself. If youre using the database to store images, the folder path-to/wp-content/uploads is still used - this folder must allow new les to be copied into it, and deleted from it.
This is probably a restriction in PHP.INI, changes will need to be made to upload_max_lesize and post_max_size.
Folder for storing images can Create the folder (defaults to path-to/wp-content/wpsbe created content) and set permissions to allow new les and folders.
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Widgets
Latest New Members
Shows members who have recently joined the site. Change the maximum number shown to increase or decrease the number of new members listed.
Yes/No Vote
Gives an attractive and simple question and yes/no answer to your members (who have to be logged in to vote). Shows votes in a graphical bar chart. Only allows one vote per site member. Include a link to the forum - leave blank if you dont want to show a link. Saving clears all the votes and the record of who has voted, do not resave once your question is live.
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Troubleshooting
Try this first
Step 1:! Step 2:! Upgrade WP Symposium to the latest version De-activate and re-activate the core WPS plugin. This ensures that the tables are up to date the version numbers are updated the reference to the correct WPS Javascript le is updated Try accessing your website with Firefox and the Firebug add-in enabled to spot Javascript errors Step 3: ! ! !
To conrm this is the problem, de-activate all your other plugins leaving just WP Symposium plugins active. If this cures the problem, re-activate each of the other plugins until the error reoccurs. You then know the plugin that is loading an incompatible version of jQuery or jQuery UI. Contact the author of the plugin to ask them how to disable their version, or if you are comfortable editing PHP, see if you can remove the line that loads jQuery or jQuery UI.
Other problems?
Problem
The login and registration plugins have disappeared
Suggestion
Before releasing the rst stable version of WPS, it was decided to remove these and let WordPress handle authentication and registration. If you want to tailor the way this happens, have a look at the Theme-My-Login plugin, we use it on www.wpsymposium.com ... This functionality is now merged with the prole plugin. You can de-activate member avatars via Settings.
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Problem
I get lots of errors appear on screen
Suggestion
Check the Health Check page, more information is displayed there.
I try and post to a wall, or edit Sounds like AJAX, and in particular Javascript, isnt a forum post and nothing working as expected on your website, conrm on the seems to happen Health Check page and try reading the section on the previous page. The WP Symposium version on the plugin page is different to the health check page My site is running very slow De-activate and re-activate the WP Symposium Core plugin.
Try reducing the polling frequency of the panel. If you have a popular site you may need to consider upgrading your hosting arrangements. Use the support forum on www.wpsymposium.com Certainly - please read the page at www.wpsymposium.com/prole/membership/ members-support
I still need help... Can someone log in to my website and sort out the problems?
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Legal Stuff
Copyright
Copyright 2010, 2011 Simon Goodchild ([email protected]) This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3, as published by the Free Software Foundation. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You can request a copy of the GNU General Public License by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. Simon Goodchild retains the copyright for the original software.
Distribution
With reference to the GPL license, you are granted permission to install the software on any website with WordPress as per the GPL license. It is not necessary to credit WP Symposium and you have freedom to edit the source code that is distributed as a package via www.wordpress.org. Other plugins compatible with WP Symposium are distributed elsewhere (i.e. not via www.wordpress.org and they are not within the scope of this declaration).
Donations
Although we love doing it, development of WP Symposium, and the hosting of www.wpsymposium.com takes time and costs money. Donations can be made via the WP Symposium website - any and all donations are received with gratitude, appreciation and thanks!
Use WordPress
We love WordPress - it rocks! Please do what you can to support it!
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