A while back I wrote a post about importing and exporting with greater detail on the wordpress ideas forum.    Here is a recap of what I wrote:

I always find myself poking around the WordPress Ideas forum to see what other users think of for suggestions of improving wordpress.    The wordpress.org team is really good at looking through these ideas and making improvements that the users want, not just the designers.   I haven’t ever posted there a new idea until today, but after searching I couldn’t find one similar.

I have searched around the ideas forum here, but I didn’t find anything. With the ever increasing size of blogs out there, the import/export functions may start running into size issues. I would like to suggest that we implement a way to break up the files either by a date range or through categories. Right now, large export files need to be manually broken up through a text editor. I have one blog that is about a 8 meg file that chokes most text editors 

The date range would be my favorite. Just my 2 cents.

The import/export is the biggest pain for myself moving things around or just making backup copies for futures use.   I hope something gets done.   I realize a plugin will work in this situation, but since services like wordpress.com use the standard code, I would like to see it implemented in the core so other services are pretty standard with this approach.

I was pleased to see that Ron wrote a plugin that does exactly what I was referring to.    The plugin is called Advanced Export/Import and really is a good plugin!     I am not sure if the WP Dev Team would look at adding something like this for the core or leave it as a plugin, but Ron was nice enough to create a ticket as well

I have been hosted on more  hosting providers than I care to admit.   I find myself extremely comfortable on shared, VPS and dedicated hosting.    Despite that, I have decided to move all my personal blogs to wordpress.com.    Why would I do this?   This post is actually meant to be a little analysis of my thought process and highlight which ones really influenced this decision.

Blog Succession

This was actually one of the biggest topics in our decision making.   I am a technical person and really love technology.   It is nothing for me to pick up a server, install and maintain software and keep accounts in order.    The rest of the family would not enjoy taking up this responsibility.   Hosting our blogs on wordpress.com frees my family from having to worry about upgrades, hosting accounts and technical difficulties.   Our blogs will always be around and secure.

Features and Upgrades

Our family accumulates blogs like they are going out of style.    Even with “1 click” upgrades of plugins, themes and the core, it makes sense to have all my blogs on a WPMU installation.    It is easy for each account to have access to all blogs in one location.    Obviously based on the first discussion point, another WPMU install on any hosting really wasn’t an option.    wordpress.com is the original WPMU install.   It can be argued that the size and structure is hard to compete with.   It is feature rich and backups are consistent.    In terms of our blogging requirements, it is more than adequate to say the least.   I also know the software well and contribute to the community when I can.   wordpress.com is also run by committed and innovative people in the wordpress community!

Focus On Blogging

I am a busy person, constantly working and trying to spend as much time with my family as possible.    Previously, I was working more in the technical field and found it easy to integrate server management into my time.   The time requirements for running all our company and personal technical projects have finally warranted outsourcing.    I just don’t have the time to spare.    I would rather focus spare time on actually blogging and using the software at this point in my life.    It will also free up more time to spend in support forums of buddypress, bbpress and wordpress.com.

My plan is to keep poking around our company installs and run trac versions of everything to keep testing and reporting bugs.    Summing up, I believe that moving to wordpress.com again is a great decision for our blogging and our family.   Hopefully someone out there might be able to relate to this post and aid in their own decision making process

I have been really busy over the past couple of months and it looks like the next month isn’t going to be any less relaxed, but a quick blog post is in order to tell you some of the things I have been up to:

• Backing up Twitter – This is not exactly the most important thing for most people, but I post quite a few links for future reference and enjoy reading old tweets, so I always want to back mine up.     I still use Twitter Tools and it is a great wordpress plugin for creating batch tweets into your blog.   I have also come across desktop tools like Twitterbackup.   Another great one is Loudtwitter which even works with wordpress.com
• Videos on wp.com – I still have my music related videos on youtube and ALL my videos on flickr, but I have decided to upload them to wp.com as well.   Partly because I love the player, but also it works well with my hosting of my blogs here.    I am still uploading up a storm, but it should be done by tomorrow.
• Online Radio – It is somewhat impossible to get around the CRTC here in Canada.   They have blocked many online radio sites including Pandora.   It seems as though last.fm is also having troubles and a really cool one mentioned to me today in slacker.com also is blocked here.   It has something to do with “licensing” but it really is censorship.    I am still looking for a good solution that will not be blocked, but running up short.

Those are some of the larger things I have spent some free time with as well as many other things that you can find in my twitter profile, but other than that my time is consumed by my work.   I am a workaholic and love it.   I am once again slacking on my other interests including bbPress, WPMU and buddypress, but when I find time I will return.

This is the second part in my effort to help explain how you can use HyperDB to scale your large WordPress, WordPress MU or Buddypress sites.     You can read the first part in the series here!    First off, again:

• This tutorial was written for testing and personal purposes.
• I make no warranty that this will work for you as all setups are generally different.
• HyperDB is designed for larger sites to scale when one server isn’t enough and not recommended on small projects
• Backup all data before trying it out.
• This tutorial is not sanctioned by Automattic or the developers, but to be used as a helping guide if possible.

In the first tutorial, I discussed the in and outs of getting your db-settings.php file configured to work with your site and used the example of getting sharing your WordPress users with another site by placing the users tables in their own database.     In this part, I want to discuss using multiple database servers as well as replication.

Replication

This is not a tutorial on setting up replication.   In fact, I have three (3) incredible articles that I am listing below that will help you set up replication:

1. Acid Drop – Great tutorial on setting up mySQL replication
2. Crazytoon – Another article that I referenced
3. HowToForge – One of the best in the game for reference

At this point, I am making the following assumptions:

• You have mySQL replication setup between at least 2 database servers
• You want to have writes going to the master and reads coming from the slaves
• Your IP’s of these servers are:  192,168.0.1, 192.168.0.2, 192.168.0.3, etc
• The database servers will have datacenter names corresponding to their function; master, slave1, slave2, etc

What we want to do first is setup your main (master) server in db-settings.php to handle all database writes as well as be last in line for database reads if the slave servers are not responding or busy:

add_db_server(’global’, 0, ‘master’, 2, 1,’192.168.0.1′,’localhost’,’database-name’,’database-user’,’database-password’);

Now, we want to put in the requests for the (slave) servers so that they don’t neither accept any writes and both slave drives will take on the database reads in the same priority.

add_db_server(’global’, 0, ‘slave1’, 1, 0,’192.168.0.2′,’localhost’,’database-name’,’database-user’,’database-password’);

add_db_server(’global’, 0, ‘slave2’, 1, 0,’192.168.0.3′,’localhost’,’database-name’,’database-user’,’database-password’);

There are a million combinations of what you want to happen.    This is just giving a rough idea of how you can have the master database server accepting all the writes which in turn replicates this data to the slaves to handle all reads of data for the most part.

It is still best to subscribe to the HyperDB mailing list as well as really look at the code to determine how things are going to happen.    The codex is also a good read.  As Andy has mentioned on the mailing list:

I am reluctant to write documentation for HyperDB because I wouldn’t advise its use to anyone who wasn’t thoroughly familiar with how it works. The code isn’t the prettiest, but it can be understood.

This concludes this tutorial and I hope that this opens up your eyes to the different setups that are possible with this great plugin!

Not sure who to give copyright to for this photo, but funny!

Last night I was sitting around and caught a movie that had a short clip from “Where are you going?” by Dave Matthews Band.   I loved and almost completely forgot that song!    It was fun to hear it again, so I decided to record a quick version of it on my Macbook.

Higher Quality – wp.com player

Lower Quality – youtube player

HyperDB is a replacement for the standard WPDB class which adds the ability to use multiple databases. HyperDB supports partition of data as well as replication.

HyperDB is a plugin written by matt, andy, ryan, & mdawaffe from Automattic.     It is written primarily as a way to help larger sites manage growth as well as offers support for replication for backup and performance redundancy.     While most users will never need something like HyperDB, this tutorial has a purpose of explaining its configuration.

We might as well get this out right now….the disclaimer!

• This tutorial was written for testing and personal purposes.
• I make no warranty that this will work for you as all setups are generally different.
• HyperDB is designed for larger sites to scale when one server isn’t enough and not recommended on small projects
• Backup all data before trying it out.
• This tutorial is not sanctioned by Automattic or the developers, but to be used as a helping guide if possible.

Now that we have that out of the way, let us continue!

The first thing you need to do is download HyperDB.   It has 3 files included.    From the readme.txt you get the following directions and should become extremely familiar with them:

Nothing goes in the plugins directory.

1. *WordPress MU only:* add this line near the top of `wp-config.php`:
`define(’WPMU’, true);`

2. Upload `db.php` to the `/wp-content/` directory. At this point, HyperDB is active. It will use the database connection constants until you complete the final steps.

3. Upload `db-settings.php` in the directory that holds `wp-config.php`

4. Edit the db settings according to the directions in that file.

5. Add this line near the top of `wp-config.php`:

`require(’db-settings.php’);`

Any value of `WP_USE_MULTIPLE_DB` will be ignored by HyperDB. If you wish to switch off multiple DB, remove the ‘require’ statement from step 5.

As you can see, it is pretty straight forward except for step 4    That is what we are going to talk about today.    I suggest that you do step 4 first using my example and then the other steps in order, but it is up to you.   In my example I am going to demonstrate how you can use HyperDB to split up your wp_users table so that you can share your users with another install.   In our PART 2, we will discuss some of the more advanced issues of HyperDB, but this is just to get you familiar with working with it.

For documentation purposes, I am going to have the following assumptions:

1. Your IP Address of your server is 192.168.0.1 and your mySQL is on the standard port
2. You have 2 databases:   1) blog 2) users
3. Your Database username is “wp-user” for both databases
4. Your Database password is “wp-password” for both databases

db-settings.php

This is the main and only configuration file required to run HyperDB.     The first thing you should notice is that line 57 is there so your install works with the readme.txt before getting to step 4.     Since we are starting on step 4, we need to comment it out right away.

// add_db_server(’global’, 0,    ”, 1, 1,                        DB_HOST,                        DB_HOST,    DB_NAME,     DB_USER,     DB_PASSWORD);

I like to copy line 61 and place it just below that previously commented out line.    This is the one that we are going to edit for our first database, “blog”.   This is the line we should copy across before we edit it.

add_db_server(’global’, 0, ‘nyc’, 1, 1,’global.mysql.example.com:3509′,’global.mysql.example.lan:3509′,’global-db’,'globaluser’,'globalpassword’);

This is where we tell HyperDB where and what our server really is.     There are some things in that configuration that can be configured for more advanced purposes, but will remain the same in this discussion.    For example, “nyc” is the New York Data center.    This is important for replication (discussed later), but not now.   Here is the configuration using our assumptions earlier and our data center we will just call “fun”

add_db_server(’global’, 0, ‘fun’, 1, 1,’192.168.0.1′,’localhost’,'blog’,'wp-user’,'wp-password’);

This tells HyperDB that we are going to have all calls (reads and writes) going to this global database unless we specify otherwise.   It is calling the IP address of our database server, since we don’t have a fancy DNS for our database setup and just localhost for the same reason.   If your host has some DNS entries setup, then you will have to adjust accordingly.

Now that we have defined our main database, we are going to add the following line below our previous one for our second database that houses our users.   *If you haven’t already, copy the wp_users table into the “users” database*

add_db_server(’users’, 0, ‘fun’, 1, 1,’192.168.0.1′,’localhost’,'users’,'wp-user’,'wp-password’);

This tells HyperDB that we have a second database setup and that we are going to have calls to it.    We haven’t told it yet what we are going to call, but that is next.   You can also copy the wp_usermeta table as well and set it up if you want the same user roles in the second blog.    I want that on a blog by blog basis, so I only am using the wp_users table.

On line 97 there is the following line:

// add_db_table(’misc’, ‘bbq_sauces’);

We are going to make sure that below this line we setup our calls to our second database, “users”.   In our example, we are adding the following lines to call the users  information from our second database:

add_db_table(’users’, ‘wp_users’);

That should be all we need to do.    Now complete the rest of the steps in the readme.txt file including copying this db-settings.php file we created to the same directory as wp-config.php, edit wp-config.php to have the following in it near the top of the file:

require(’db-settings.php’);

Finally, copy db.php to your /wp-content/ directory.     Everything should be working correctly at this point.    If you find it isn’t, just comment out the require that we just did in wp-config.php, rename db.php to db.txt and double check all your settings.   When I say comment out, I mean:

// require(’db-settings.php’);

This concludes our PART 1 series on HyperDB configuration.    As you can see, you could have a second install of WP or WPMU using HyperDB and tell it to use the second “users” database and completely share users!    In PART 2 we will discuss replication and configuring other plugins like Buddypress to have its tables in a database for itself.

Thoughts, comments, suggestions, changes and improvements welcomed!   The second in this series is available here!

Much to the dismay of certain phpBB users, the install of phpBB 3 on TalkPress really was a joke. Once the spam content was too much to take, the members of automattic decided to put the new TalkPress install of bbPress on the domain for their testing purposes.  TalkPress will be the “WPMU” of bbPress with a hosted service for forums. It really is exciting as Sam talks about it on the bbPress blog:

Many people have already noticed that Automattic has soft launched TalkPress. TalkPress was mentioned and explained some time ago in the bbPress forums, but there is no harm in restating our intentions here.

It has been public for a while that Automattic was going to launch a hosted forum service based on bbPress and the decision was made early on to not call it bbPress.com for three reasons.

1. It avoids the sort of confusion users experience trying to distinguish between WordPress.org and WordPress.com
2. bbPress is not a particularly good product name for that service
3. The bbPress.com domain name is already registered to someone else

The last reason is fairly conclusive.

So the name TalkPress was chosen. As a joke we put up a phpBB forum at TalkPress.com for a while, which we all found quite amusing until it got heavily spammed, so down that came!

In the meantime we have been preparing bbPress to accommodate many of the needs that this new service would require, specific functionality has included preparing bbPress to handle the huge user tables of WordPress.com – some of this work is already available to bbPress users (even if it’s only really useful if you have millions of users).

The architecture behind WordPress.com demanded that we make bbPress play nice with the HyperDB extension for WordPress. This neat database load-balancing and redundancy tool is now fully compatible with bbPress. So if you want to run your bbPress site with redundant MySQL databases in multiple datacenters then that’s possible now too. bbPress now has a pretty enviable set of advanced options for MySQL connectivity.

Make sure you read the blog post for the entire discussion!     Exciting stuff as hosted forums are a need by many people!

I am a huge fan of Saving Abel and was lucky enough to watch them live last week. They opened up for Nickelback along with Seether. My biggest complaint was that they never managed to get the sound checks correct and not only was the music way too loud and distorted, the lyrics were quiet and it was difficult to understand anything. I still enjoyed the show either way. One of my favorite songs out by them is “Goodbye”

There’s no need to worry all day long
Cause worry don’t help a thing
We’ve burned our bridges at both ends
So if I never see you again

Goodbye, so long
hope you enjoy it while it last
cause soon this world of ours is gone.
Farewell to you all
cause heaven knows that
we don’t have all that far to fall

It feels like we’re in over our heads
That we’ve wasted our days
Running through life with reckless disregard
now there’s nothing to save
Sooner than later I’ll be high
maybe I’ll gain my peace of mind
so here’s to the world passing us by
goodbye

Goodbye, so long
hope you enjoy it while it last
cause soon this world of ours is gone.
Farewell to you all
cause heaven knows
we don’t have all that far to fall

So wave goodbye
as we count down to the end
one more trip of all the sun
if I never see you again
Cause sooner than later I’ll be high
so cheers to the world passing us by
goodbye

Goodbye, so long
hope you enjoy it while it last
cause soon this world of ours is gone.
Farewell to you all
cause heaven knows
we don’t have all that far to fall

****Works with BB RC 1.0, BP 1.0, MU 2.7.1 ****

I already have a sticky post in the buddypress forums, but thought I would also put this up on my blog for anyone else that this might help on getting forums integrated properly with buddypress.   It changes often, but this works correctly as of the date of this post.

I notice that this forum thing is really not that easy for everyone to put in place and I had to do it several times myself to get it working properly. What worked on one server didn’t work as planned on another one. Strange, but I thought I would write this to see if it helps anyone out.

Integration Assumptions:

First off, this assumes that you are using SVN or RC1 of bbPress 1.0.  Buddypress 1.0 or SVN as well. I also haven’t tested this without at least having bbPress using the WPMU user tables for integration. You also NEED to be running WPMU 2.7.1+  or SVN

*** these are requirements for running the bp-forums integration, not buddypress in general! ***

bbPress Side (First):

1) you have bbpress installed and a new user created on the “bbPress” side which you granted “administrator” rights by the keymaster
2) you copy the “buddypress-enable.php” plugin out of the bp-forums folders and copy it into your /my-plugins/ folder (create if it doesn’t exist) so it is /my-plugins/buddypress-enable.php ****People ask about /bb-plugins/ versus /my-plugins/ and put it in /my-plugins/
3) Enable the plugin through your bbPress administration side for plugins
4) Edit “settings” to enable xmlrpc and pingbacks (both)
5) edit your bb-config.php and just before the closing php call at the bottom of the page put:

$bb->bb_xmlrpc_allow_user_switching = true;

buddypress Side (Second):

6) Go into your main blog dashboard as the “site-admin” and go to the “bbPress Forums” page. Put in the URL of your forum like http://yoursite.com/forums/ and make sure you have the ending slash on that one.
7) Put in the user that you created in step 1 with the bbPress “administration” rights and their password. I never changed the password, just used the random one it sent me, but it is up to you. I usually save it a couple of times to ensure it was entered due to a refreshing bug at time of writing this.
Go to one of your groups (new or existing) and go to the group admin page. Make sure “discussion” is turned off. If it was already off that is fine, but if it was enabled already, turn it off
9) Turn the group “discussion” back on and then physically go to your forums URL and see if it created the forum on the bbPress side without trying to create a new topic on the buddypress side.

If you have the new forum now, then you should skip to step 10. If not, go through steps 1-9 again and make sure you got all the steps perfectly.

10) If you have made it this far, it will work, but I like to create the first post in the new forum on the bbPress side and then see if it shows up in the buddypress group forum. Old habit, but for odd circumstance, it seems to work best for me. If it works, try creating a new topic on the group you have working.

***Don’t forget that you have to do step 8 for every group that was created before you enabled the forum integration! Very important***

Other notes:

1) The refreshing bug in step 7 killed it for me a couple of times and I made sure I saved it at least 2 times.
2) Forgetting the line in bb-config.php killed it for me a couple of times as well.
3) In one install I had to change the bbPress “user” with administration rights password and on the bbPress side and then completing step 7 again.
4) I also found that through “previous testing” I had some bp_groupmeta entries that were screwing things up with duplicates for the same forum in the database. Shouldn’t happen to anyone else, but that screwed some things up for me as well.

In terms of having buddypress and bbPress working together, I am sure it works with buddypress on one server and bbPress on another since it works through the xmlrpc module which makes it very powerful.

Let me know if I am out to lunch as well or you have anything else to add!