Getting Started

It’s simple to set up a social network with WordPress and WP Symposium.

Step 1: Install WordPress

With it’s famous 5 minute install, visit www.wordpress.org to get and install WordPress.

Step 2: Install WP Symposium

This will take about 30 seconds… On the WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins -> Add New. Search for “wp symposium” and click on Install. Done.

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If you’re used to WordPress, or confident playing around, then go for it. However, the following may help you get familiar with WP Symposium, it’s a walk-through of your first installation. Come back here if you need to.

The following covers:

• First Steps
• Tidying up WordPress
• Things to try first if things aren’t working out for you

First steps

Via the WordPress admin dashboard, your installation page verifies your WP Symposium installation, and allows you to set up pages within your social network.

The installation page is divided into three main areas:

1. The activated features, and
2. The activation code
3. A set of tools to help check your installation

The activation code

This is not something you need to worry about at the moment. If and when you decide to look at certain WP Symposium bronze plugins, to avoid having a polite notice shown at the top of your website, you will need to enter an activation code.

The Activated Features

After your initial installation, you will have no features activated. We need to activate some of the WP Symposium features so that they can be used on your website. So…

Activating WP Symposium features

Go the your WP Symposium Installation page, via the admin dashboard menu -> WP Symposium -> Installation.

We are going to focus on the basic features just for now, so click on the checkbox beside the following and click on “Update” button below them:

• Forum
• Mail
• Members Directory
• Profile

Those four features will allow you to get your social network up and running. So we have our four features activated, we now need to add them to our website.

WP Symposium features are added to WordPress pages. With a clean WordPress install there are no pages that currently exist (other than the Sample page). Hence the drop down lists that are shown beside each WPS feature may only have Sample page listed.

That’s fine, we are going to create a new page for each of our WP Symposium plugins.

To do that, click on the New Page button beside Forum.

This will instruct WordPress to go away, create a new page, and put the shortcode [symposium-forum] on to that page.

Note that the New Page button (and drop-down list) has been replaced with a link to your new page, and an [Edit] link allow you to edit the page that was created.

Also notice that the status column to the right shows that WP Symposium has updated it’s internal reference to the new page. That’s a good thing as it’s used elsewhere throughout WP Symposium, not that you need to worry about that.

So, let’s take a look at the page that was created. Click on the Edit link beside Forum.

You will be taken to the WordPress page edit screen, where you can see the shortcode has been entered for you.

If you followed the previous section, you will be looking at a new WordPress page with the WP Symposium forum shortcode in its content.

If not, then go to one of your existing WordPress pages with a WP Symposium shortcode in the content, and we will carry on together!

To remove the forum from this page, simply remove the [symposium-forum] shortcode and click on Update.

Now, what you must do, which is very important whenever you remove or manually add a WP Symposium shortcode to a page is re-visit the WP Symposium -> Installation page.

When you re-visit the page, you can see that WP Symposium has updated it’s internal information with the change your made, and that you are now prompted once again to add the forum to a new or existing page.

Having added the forum in the previous section – go back and do it if you skipped ahead! – we can now add the other plugins. On the WP Symposium -> Installation page click on the Add New button for each of the remaining plugins.

You now have all four plugins (forum, profile, mail and member directory) set up and ready to use.

Go to your website and marvel at your creation. Your home page will probably be set to the blog, like WordPress does, we’ll tidy that up below.

Clicking on Forum, Mail, Members and Profile and you should see your social network come to life!

Well, with you as the only member it’s not exactly kicking with activity yet, but the building blocks are now in place.

Pat yourself on the back.

Tidying up your WordPress installation

Branching out a bit here, as this isn’t really about WP Symposium, but more about WordPress itself. However, it will make your WP Symposium installation a little more conducive to a social network.

By default, WordPress doesn’t use pretty permalinks, so you end up with your pages looking something like http://www.example.com/?page_id=6 – this is just ugly, and doesn’t really help your users know where they are. Far nicer would be to have something like http://www.example.com/profile.

Go to Settings -> Permalinks (on the WordPress admin dashboard). From the list of options shown, select one you prefer, except the top one, and click on Save Changes.

Now return to the WP Symposium -> Installation page and you will see that your plugins are installed on pages with far nicer web addresses (URLs and WP Symposium as updated it’s internal information). This is important!

WP Symposium has also updated its internal information with the new permalinks.

WordPress comes with a rather snazzy menu system, ready to use. So (I’m assuming you’re using TwentyEleven theme), let’s add a menu.

Not all themes are compatible with the WordPress menu, although most are, and obviously the theme that comes with WordPress (TwentyEleven) is.

So in WordPress admin dashboard, go to Appearance -> Menus.

First of all we need to create a new menu, that we will add items to. So in the screen you’re looking at enter the name for your menu. I’m going to be really creative and call mine “Menu”, ahem. Then hit the “Create Menu” button.

Now, associate your menu (yep, you can have more than one) with the primary menu, it’s done in the top-left box. The click on Save.

Nothing much changes after clicking save – well, nothing at all – but you can now start to add your WordPress pages to your menu. First select Members, Mail, Profile and Forum from the Pages box, and click on “Add to menu”.

The pages you selected, will then appear in the larger box to the right. Drag and drop them to change their order to one your prefer, and click on “Save Menu”. Note that you can drag menu items underneath other menu items – they will be second level menus that drop down from the top level. Cool!

Now you have created a menu, and added pages to it.

You can add more pages, as you create them, to your menu at any time by re-visiting this page at Appearance -> Menus.

But for now, go back to your site to check out your new menu.

Removing the Header Image

Okay, so it’s pretty, but very soon you get to realize that the large header image takes up a lot of your screen, meaning you have to scroll down to the content. Bit of a no-no though in terms of usability.

So, to remove the header image, via the WordPress admin dashboard go to Appearance -> Header.

Lots of nice options, but to remove it simply click on the “Remove Header Image” button and job done. Visit your site to see how more content is shown.

By default, WordPress’s home page is the blog page. Great if you are running a blog, but no so great if you are running a social network.

Let’s assume for now that you want a welcome page, a true “home page”.

First create a new page via Pages -> Add New. Put in any old content for now, you can always go back and work on it (and trust me, you will!).

Then go to Settings -> Reading.

The first option “Front page displays” allows you to switch from your latest blog posts to a static page. This is what you want. Change the Front page to your newly created home page and click on Save.

If you intend to have a blog on your site too, create a page for that and select that new page in the other drop down list.

Problems? Try this first.

Make sure you have the latest version installed

With every release, bug fixes if needed will be included. Keep your version up to date (it’s also hard to support older versions of code…..).

Install Firefox/Firebug

Make sure you are using the Firefox browser, with the Firebug add-in installed and enabled – it will tell you if there is a Javscript error and where the error is. This tends to help identify and solve about 98.257% of problems.

Steps to follow

1. First visit the Installation page to make sure the internal settings are updated
2. Change your theme to TwentyTen or TwentyEleven
3. De-activate all non-WP Symposium Plugins
4. Does it now work?
5. If it does, re-activate your plugins one at a time, testing after each one is re-activated – when things stop working you’ve found a plugin that is clashing
6. If all your plugins re-activate and you are still okay, change your theme back – does the problem now occur?

At some point in the above process, Firefox/Firebug may tell you that your have a Javscript error. The simple thing to do is not use the plugin or theme that caused the problem. But if that’s not an option, then read one. An example of a common error is something like:

.autocomplete is not a function

The problem is that a plugin or your theme is loading a version of jQueryUI that does not include a function (autocomplete in this example). It may be a different function, but the above is quite common.

Using any plain text editor find out where in your plugin or theme jQueryUI is being loaded by searching the .php files in your plugin folder (under wp-content/plugins) for “jquery-ui”. Then comment out the line with two backslashes at the start of the line (//) and save the file. WP Symposium can then load the latest version of jQueryUI with an up-to-date set of functions.

For example, the file being loaded will look something like the following (although with an older version number):

jquery-ui-1.8.11.custom.min.js

Duplicate WP Symposium plugins

The way to solve this is delete via FTP your WP Symposium plugin folder(s) which are in your /wp-content/plugins folder (or something similar).

DO NOT delete the plugins via the WordPress plugin admin page as this will delete ALL your WP Symposium settings and data.

Once you manually deleted the folder(s) via FTP, re-add WP Symposium plugin via the WordPress->plugins->Add New menu option, which will download and install the latest version available.

Permissions

Some web servers can be tight on the correct permissions of files and folders. For example, “page not found” can be reported if permissions are not correct (either too secure or not secure enough).

This is just a quick overview, read more about server permissions, ls and chmod.

To see if you are getting the “page not found” problem, use Firefox with the Firebug plug-in installed and on the Console screen you will see red error saying “page not found” when the files are actually there.

Using an FTP client or command line access, check that plugin .php, .js and .css files (all files) are 644 (that means readable and writeable by your site admin, readable by groups and others). Folders (directories) should be 755 (that means readable, writeable and executable by your site admin, readable and executable by groups and others).

When copying files to your server, they may have been set as 777. This will cause problems with access (pages reported as “page not found”) and is very insecure for your site.

Each FTP client will allow you to check and change permissions in a different way. Read about how to use FTP clients to change file permissions.

If using a Unix (Linux, Ubuntu, Redhat, etc) server you can check permissions with the command “ls -l” – you are looking for the left column which will look like “-rw-r–r–” for files (which represents). If they are “-rwxrwxrwx” they are 777. To change them to 644 enter the command “chmod 644 *.php” or “chmod 644 *.js” (for example). To change folders, use the command “chmod 755 ajax” (for example to change the permissions on the ajax folder).

You can also recursively change permissions. Go to your plugins folder and use the following commands:

find . -name \*.js -type f -print -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find . -name \*.php -type f -print -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find . -name \*.css -type f -print -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find . -type d -print -exec chmod 755 {} \;

Windows Permission

You need to give “Write” permission to your plugins directory.

This must also be done for your images and temp directory. If using IIS7 the users requiring permission are: IUSER, IIS_USER, and NETWORK SERVICE.

Still got problems?

Sorry to hear that, the forum is your best bet for free community support – or upgrade your membership for priority support via a helpdesk with guaranteed response.