As I mentioned in the activity stream post, there are going to be a number of issues porting Civatar as it stands going to the new server, and it still isn’t possible to stay on this one much longer.

Essentially there are database issues I have to clean up – it isn’t just the size that is the problem, I got around that, it’s that there are data errors in the current database that need cleaning up.

There are plugins that have to be updated to work with PHP 8.2

And there are some that are not working properly even here, the user block and moderation plugins for example have problems.

I guess one question that comes to mind to me anyway is would we be better off trying something else?  I’m really not happy with the way buddy press works, the only good part to me is the fact we can all have our own sites, but the activity stream is wonky even with those.

Is anybody up for trying something different, and by “trying” I mean I load the software on the new server under a different domain name so we can use it while Civatar is still operational here.

I can link a page of all the current self hosted social software packages if you want to take a look at them.

Other than that, I am going to take the next week trying to fix the issues here so it (hopefully) can be ported.  I am less optimistic about that than I was before.  Plan “B” of course was to change the Domain so it pointed back to the old server.  We are there.

I reerted to an earlier version of the custom e-mail plugin I wrote, mail should be going to yahoo addresses again. I can see if they are still getting blocked if it happens and will take further action if I see any.

Both Divi Builder and the Divi theme needed updating, I did that manually since automatic updates for them don’t work on this site.

You can now block users, the option shows up on the profiles. Now a request: Please don’t block anybody unless they do something block-worthy here, let’s not have carryover from disagreements on Schmooze please.

I also installed some moderation tools. For those to be used somebody is going to have to be made moderator. At the moment I don’t see any huge need for them, but if we grow to the point we have problem children, we are going to need to decide who will moderate. It’s not going to be me.

There is a lot to learn with Gutenberg, I think the first thing would be don’t try to do your formatting with a word processor. The problem is the code it generates is not HTML code. You may be able to save it as HTML code and use it but a simple copy and paste isn’t going to work.

That said, there is a heck of a lot you can do in the Gutenberg editor yourself if you learn how to use it. In the interest of not reinventing the wheel, probably a good place to start is this article: https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/wordpress-gutenberg-guide/

Really short version:

Pull up available blocks by pressing the + sign at top left.

Text formatting tools are in the Block editor on the right ->

When you have the available blocks section open, check out patterns, they have some interesting pre-made blocks in those that can be easily edited.

Actually you can do a whole lot more in it than I originally gave it credit for.

Anyway play around with it. While DIVI gives you a lot more options, Gutenberg is pretty full featured once you get to know it. Oh yeah, and SAVE your draft periodically. You don’t have to publish to save, and it saves half an hour of work going

*POOF!*

That link is up on the top right.

If you want to disable comments needing to be authorized go to your dashboard, settings, discussion and uncheck the box that says a commenter must have a previously approved comment. You might also want to adjust the number of links allowed, I’d leave some limit on that one though you may want it larger than 2.

If we get a spambot invasion you will want to turn that back on, also you may need to turn on the one that says a user needs to be logged in to comment.

As long as that doesn’t happen leave that alone.

To start this process, click on the Sites tab then on the link “Create New Site”

So Site Name for example, could be nutsyandtheegg and Site Title could be Nutsy And The Egg

They don’t have to match, but the Site Name DOES have to be unique – if somebody else used it already on this site, you can’t, and you will get an error, so keep that in mind

Here’s what it looks like after the site is created:

That’s the reason there can be no spaces or special characters in it.

I’d also like to point out that if you want to invite someone to visit your site without going to civatar first, just give them that URL, it will take them directly to your site, they don’t have to go directly to civatar first.

OK, one last issue and we are done:

It is still findable if you have the URL to the site, and if you give that URL to somebody, they can get to your site.

The last item is if you choose to make it private as you work on it, I have to flip a switch for you to make it public afterwards. No big deal, I just have to check a checkbox, just let me know.

That’s it, two text boxes to fill, one radio button to choose, then hit that CREATE SITE box and you are on your way!

Last note: What you really have there is your own wordpress site. You can play with customization, menus, categories, pages, anything you can do on a wordpress site except for install your own plugins. That has to be done at the network level.

And if your site is marked public, anything you do there will make its way to the activity feed on Civatar itself.

Any questions, just ask.

Gutenberg is the default editor for both Pages and Posts (Your Blog). Divi is a fancier editor that requires more work to learn. We’ll get to that one in stages later, there is a lot to cover there. If you want to use Gutenberg, click on the “Use Default Editor Button”

You are also going to need to give your post/page a title, I usually do that before I choose the editor since Divi can get wonky about that. Gutenberg doesn’t care as long as you remember to give it a title before you publish it.

And that’s about it. A fuller discussion of using the Gutenberg editor is at this link:

https://wpastra.com/guides-and-tutorials/wordpress-gutenberg-guide/

No reason to reinvent the wheel 😉

The last thing to do is to publish the post/page. This makes it readable in the blog, for pages, you also need to set them up on the menu for people to find them. More on that later. In any case, you need to press the “Publish” Button twice…

The first time tells it you are ready to publish, and brings up publishing options, the second time actually publishes the post. If you don’t press it twice, you haven’t posted.