Punit Ganshani

Technologist, Geek and a Photographer!

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Installing Buddypress Template Pack

This post is very specific to installing non-Buddypress compliant themes on Buddypress enabled WordPress website. So for those who don’t know what is Buddypress – Buddypress is a plugin that enables creating public/private social sites with features such as Blogging, Tweets, Forums, Groups, Activity Streams, Discussions and many more. More features can be enabled by installed 100s of Buddypress plugins. You can read more here

Problem with Buddypress –

Buddypress creates new or uses existing pages for its features. But it does not display any page content and instead replaces the page content by its standard pages. This means that if you have a page called ‘Groups’ and it is blank but if it is configured with Buddypress you can still view the Groups page.

Now if you install any non-Buddypress-ready theme with Buddpress enabled, you will see the actual Groups page (that can be blank, or may contain something) but not the Buddypress Groups page.

Think of it. You have less than 50 Buddypress-compatible themes in market (as of 3 Jan 2012) and over 10000s non-compliant theme.

The solution – Buddypress Template Pack

You can install a plugin named ‘Buddypress Template Pack’ to convert any Buddypress non-compliant theme to a compliant theme. However, this template pack does not convert each theme into Buddypress theme. It finds out links and redirects them to use Buddypress behavior.

That’s as simple as said. Download it from here

But many users face issues while activating this plugin

Error 404 – Page Not Found
Error 500 – Internal Server Error

and you could be just another one getting this error. This error is primarily because the currently activated theme is creating hindrance in changing the settings. These errors have an easy fix :

Deactivate the plugin. If you are unable to, then go to \wp-content\plugin and append the folder name by TEMP
Enable a theme that is non-compliant to Buddypress. You can use a default theme for the time.
Activate the plugin. If you have renamed the plugin folder, you should revert that change.
Enable a Buddypress theme
Run through the wizard of plugin to do the settings.

That should help you get going!

Step-by-step guide to installing WordPress on Windows 8

Now let’s say you want to go online with your own blog. So you can just go about purchasing a domain name and install WordPress. Sounds great! But if you are not sure whether you will be able to write blogs on a regular basis, then I suggest you first install WordPress on your local machine and practice writing blogs for 2-3 months before buying a domain.

Well there are other reasons why you would want to install WordPress locally such as:

You want to try out new plugins, or themes before pushing them on your actual website/blog.
Or you want to do some development on WordPress to customize your blog
You are geek and want to understand how WordPress works
You want to host your blog / website on your server (with static IP) and point the domain name to it
As said earlier, you want to check whether you can write enough on your blog

So let’s install WordPress on your OS. Now you could download PHP, MySQL and WordPress individually from their websites or you can choose to use Microsoft Web Platform Installer and let it do the downloading and installing stuff for you.

Download the Microsoft Web Platform Installer from here and once you have done it, you can follow these steps

Step One: Search and select WordPress in Microsoft Web Platform Installer

Search and select WordPress and WebMatrix in the Microsoft Web Platform Installer and once done, click on Install.

Step Two: Select it for installation

Step Three: Select MySQL to be installed on your machine

Step Four: Setting up root password for MySQL database

Setting up password for user ‘root’ of MySql database. Keep this password safe, you might need it. Let’s say you entered XYZ.

Step Five: Completing the Wizard, setting up WordPress

Database Admin: root
Database Admin Password: XYZ
Database User Name: wordpressuser
Database Password: Your-Password

Database Server: localhost
Database Name: wordpress

Step Six: Accessing your website

You can install WebMatrix from Microsoft Platform Installer to be able to view and manage WordPress with more ease.

You can visit the website on http://localhost:22059 as visible in WebMatrix to view your WordPress site and configure it.

Step Seven: Configuring your WordPress site

To install and test plugins/themes, or view WordPress code you can browse the folder in My Web Sites

That’s it. WordPress is all yours on your own machine. You have latest versions of WordPress, MySQL and PHP installed on your machine by following 7-simple steps!

Upgrading to WordPress 3.3 on GoDaddy hosting

WordPress 3.3 has been released a couple of days ago and GoDaddy has already allowed upgrading it through its panel. And as an enthusiast you could upgrade it yourself as well. But using WordPress on Godaddy has never been simple and straight forward. So a few tips before you mess up during the upgrade exercise.

Backup your database

Go to your GoDaddy MyAccount and select the website you would want to upgrade the WordPress version for. Click on Web Hosting option to launch the Web Hosting Control Panel.

Click on Database -> MySQL database and select the wordpress database and click on Backup. It would take anywhere between 10 minutes – 4 hours for a backup to be created in _db_backups folder on your site. You can mention some other folder as well. But I would prefer to have it kept same

Disable your plugins

You could login into your WordPress admin to disable all the plugins, or alternatively, just rename the existing folder to plugins_old folder using FTP client, or GoDaddy FTP Manager.

I prefer to rename it to plugins_old before proceeding with the installation.

Download the latest WordPress package

Download the latest WordPress package from the wordpress website – http://wordpress.org/download/ You may choose to follow any one of the approaches

Approach One: Download, extract the zip file into a folder. Use a FTP client to

Delete the folders (wp-admin, wp-include) of your website
Upload the folders using FTP

Approach Two: Use GoDaddy File Manager

Open the File Manager
Click on upload button to upload the wordpress.zip file to your website
Once uploaded, un-archive the wordpress.zip file to the folder that has your wordpress files. Remember to tick ‘Overwrite’ option while doing so.
Once completed, delete the wordpress.zip file

Approach Two will not take you more than 5 minutes, while approach one can be very slow and boring process.

Visit the website. It should be working, but wait!!!

Now if you visit your website, it should be working with the new WordPress 3.3 update. But you still have to enable your plugins so let’s follow the steps:

Using FTP client, or File Manager delete the new folder ‘Plugins’ created under wp-content folder
Rename the plugins_old to Plugins folder
Visit the admin page of the website
It will request you to upgrade the database. Ideally this should work the best, but if it does not you still would have the data backup with you.
Once the upgrade is complete, you can visit the admin area and check all your plugins running as usual

Installing Buddypress Template Pack

Problem with Buddypress –

The solution – Buddypress Template Pack

Related Posts:

Step-by-step guide to installing WordPress on Windows 8