Posted by Simon Goodchild  at April 2nd, 2012

Those of your who have used WP Symposium for at least a couple of months will have been used to weekly updates, in fact it’s one of the goals of WPS to upgrade little and often, fixing bugs quickly and adding new features.

So why has there been a gap of several weeks? Let me explain.

First, sorry. It’s unusual and not my preferred way of working, but needs must. The reason being is a big change to the back-end of WP Symposium, integrating better with WordPress itself.

Second, sorry again – you may not even notice any difference, but trust me, this was a big change and a lot of hard work has gone into coding and testing. Particular, and massive thanks, to AlphaGolf – a dedicated supporter of WP Symposium without whom this change would not have happened.

Release Schedule

1. The new code is currently running on the WP Symposium website, for testing purposes. As soon as it’s stable, the code will be made available as a release candidate. The version number of the release will be 12.04.21 RC1. And the name – yes, releases will have names now in true WordPress tradition – will be “AlphaGolf” in honour of this WPS user’s dedication to the cause! The plan is to make this release candidate available on 7th April, coinciding with a week away for me. I’ll be trying to avoid breaking any bones on a snowy mountain again whilst letting folk try out the release candidate.
2. Although every site admin should backup their plugins and database before upgrading them, I appreciate that this doesn’t happen. I strongly and with lots of gentle persuasive hugs urge you to backup your plugins folder and database this time. (Use FTP to take a copy of your plugins, and a tool like phpMyAdmin that you’ll probably have to take a backup of your database, check with your hosting company if you’re not sure).
3. On my return on 14th April (realistically a day or so after once I’ve caught up), if no serious problems that can’t be fixed have been reported, it will officially be released on 21st April.

When upgraded, WP Symposium will migrate users details from a dedicated table, to the WordPress user metadata table (see below). This must be allowed to finish. The time it takes is dependent on the number of users, typically 100 users are migrated per minute.

Please let the process finish, you should see a progress bar steadily move across your screen (rapidly if you have a small number of users):

So, what are the key changes? In addition to a number of bug fixes, and small enhancements (like A-Z on member directory), the two significant changes are to the use of the database.

WPS configuration table

Configuration options used to be in the wp_symposium_config table (wp_ prefix may differ on your installation of WordPress). This upgrade copies those configuration settings into the wp_options table – the core WordPress options table. Why has this been done? To reduce the number of WPS tables, and make the plugin more “WordPress standard”. It’s where site admin’s will expect to find configuration options.

If you want to see the WPS configuration options in the database after the upgrade, via a tool like phpMyAdmin, run the following:

SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name LIKE 'symposium%'

Note that wp_options may have a different prefix on your installation.

WPS user meta table

User meta data (information about the user, profile settings, etc) were stored in a table called wp_symposium_usermeta (again wp_ prefix may differ on your installation). As part of the upgrade, this information is moved to the wp_usermeta table – it’s the core WordPress table for storing user meta information.

You can see them, for a particular user, by running the following in phpMyAdmin:

SELECT * FROM wp_usermeta where user_id = 1 AND meta_key LIKE 'symposium%'

You’ll need to change the user_id to the ID of a user you know, and wp_usermeta may have a different prefix on your installation.

So really, why again?

Well admin’s will have more power to use WP Symposium user meta information. First off, you can now query any of the WP Symposium user data using WordPress standard get_user_meta function from anywhere in a theme page template or any other plugin.

You know those extended fields? Well any of the information your user’s save via the WPS profile page, using those extended fields, can be accessed on your templates and plugins. You’ll notice a “slug” on the extended field information (on the WPS profile admin page), and using that slug you can get this information use the above function. For example, if you add an extended field with the slug of gender, you can retrieve this information with the follow WordPress function:

echo get_user_meta(1, 'symposium_extended_gender', true);

I’ve put 1 in as an example user ID, you can use any.

And the other WPS profile user meta can be retrieved using the following (note, the plugin required is shown – non-core plugins are part of the Bronze package):

So for example, to display a user’s last login (with user ID 1 in the example below), you would use:

echo get_user_meta(1, 'symposium_last_login', true);

To show the currently logged in user’s last login, you would use:

global $current_user;
echo get_user_meta($current_user->ID, 'symposium_last_login', true);

And hopefully there’s more

The goal is to provide further functionality such that the WordPress profile fields can be integrated with WP Symposium (the author’s bio description for example) – thanks AlphaGolf! Depending on the success of the release candidate(s), you’ll be able to link WPS extended fields with the WordPress profile fields so that both can be updated from either the WP Symposium profile page, or the WordPress edit profile page. Watch this space….