Given all of the buzz around the WPMU forums for 1.5.1 and the daily builds and updates (Doncha is working his busy lil butt off) we tried , yet again, to test SPF on an existing build of wpmu 1.5.1…
It crashed…
Here is the postmortem…
INSTALLATION:
After several failed attempts to run the installer script with our standard suite of plugins installed and activated, we figured out that all other plugins must be disabled when performing this opperation…. The result, 12 different members catagories and 24 different permissions settings by the time we had a successful install complete and usher us to the management page.
SETUP:
As you can guess, with so many member categories and permission settings, setting up our first Groups and Forums was a bit of a nightmare.
The first forums were completely inaccessible by any of our users, because they were all in the wrong members groups.
Unfortunately, though you can CREATE members groups in the SPF back end, you can NOT in fact UN-create, or delete them. (Andy, I think this is a small oversight that should be corrected.) We actually had to resort to completely uninstalling SPF using the uninstall option in the tools menu before re-installing (with all other plugins off still)
Once this was completed, installation and setup performed correctly as expected.
USAGE:
Once we were set with groups, forums, users all working properly, we noticed 22 comments in the moderation list, all of them SPAM. (HOW DO THE SPAM BOTS FIND US SO QUICKLY?)
We went back to the plugin menu and activated our anti-spam and poof… our dashboard disappears, COMPLETELY.
Manual Navigation using typed urls for back end pages is not for the mild mannered or the weak hearted. You will be sputtering obscenities within 5 minutes and continue on for several hours afterwards.
Some Dashboard Pages only half appeared, the Manage tab from the dashboard only displayed what blog we were in, and the plugin page stopped loading before any plugins were actually displayed, let alone giving you the opportunity to activate or deactivate any of them.
Here is the list of plugins that are still compatible with SPF in WPMU:
Lightbox 2
AutoLightbox
THATS IT!
Activating ANY OTHER plugin damaged, to one degree or another, the wpmu 1.5.1 backend making some or all functions inaccessible or inoperable. WP-Custom AntiSPAM: FAILED, Akismet anti-spam: FAILED, Hello Dolly; FAILED (WHO CONFLICTS WITH Hello Dolly?!?)
I make specific note, that ALL of the plugins we tested worked perfectly fine in WPMU 1.3.3 with SPF, and to verify this we updated to the current SPF 3.1.3 beta 1 on an existing wpmu 1.3.3 install with absolutely no problems.
Does this mean that SPF is poorly written? Absolutely NOT! Here is why.
We also tested the same setup with:
rs-discus Forum - Same Symptoms; Same Failure
xd-forums - Would Not Activate
bbPress integration plugins - Same Symptoms; Same Failures.
The problem uniquely lies within WPMU 1.5.1 and the methods applied in the backend. I am not sure what exactly has happened here, but something is different… as of this writing, SPF is NOT compatible with wpmu 1.5.1.
Forums
