For the last one month I did not write a single blog! Was I busy? Not at all! I was in sylhet for some days. Came back on 15th september. Then started buliding a website for Fredskorpset Bangladesh. The site was created using WordPress. It contains a blog (as News), Events and a Forum. As a large number of plugins are available for WordPress, using this blog engine as CMS is quite handy.

First, I selected a widgetized theme. Then started adding things on it. As wordpress is a blogging engine, creating the news section was easy. just the comments and some other parts were chopped off. For the Upcoming Events section I used rs-event plugin. Just give a date to a post, and the rs-event will treat it as an event and display it on the sidebar as an upcoming event. It is quite straight forward.

The forum was created using rs-discuss plugin. There are other forum plugins available for WordPress but I choose this one as it looked quite neat and lightweight. It uses the worpress database for user validation. It was quite great, as I wanted. But sadly when I installed this plugin somehow it was not working. I felt so bad, I then tried some other plugins like wp-forum, but did not like them. So, I came back to rs-event again, installed it again and found it is not working again!! Installing rs-discuss, Like other WordPress plugins, is quite simple, so there should not be any problem at all, I went to the rs-discuss users forum, there are many other problems people are talking about, but no one is complaining about the installation.

Hmm, then why me having such problem? The installation seems successful, the admin panel has a new section named Forum. You can also run diagnostic from there which will check the installation. When I run diagnostic it says everything is ok. But when I click on the link for Forum from the site it shows nothing. Then I start checking the installation script for rs-discusss.

And I finaly found the problem! Somewhere in the installation script I found a db query :

$wpdb->query(
"INSERT INTO {$table_prefix}posts ( post_status, post_title, post_content, post_name )
VALUES ( 'static', '".__('Forums', 'rs-discuss')."', '<!--rs-discuss-->\r\n"
....

That was not somehow executing during the installation! Then I manually inserted
‘<!–rs-discuss–>\r\n’ into the post_content of the post which is supposed to show the Forum. And then it worked!

Though I solved the problem I could not figure out why this query was not executing! The forum should be only visible when the user is logged in. But there was no such option like this in the rs-discuss plugin. So I had to add some code for checking that before showing the forum.

Now I needed a Login form in the page. I searched for such plugin and found King-login.

Now, how the new users will be registered? WordPress has a registration system that let an user to register on his own. But I don’t want this. I want users to apply for registration by filling a form. And the administrator will later approve the registration. The administrator when logged in should see all the users who are awaiting for his approval. From that list admin should be able to approve or delete the request. After approval the user will be notified through email. I did not find any such plugin. So, I started to add my own code. And finally got it right.

Eveything is done. Now when I uploaded the site for testing, Sabur vai asked to change the Theme! In WordPress you can change the theme by a single click of mouse. But as I changed some template codes too (like not showing the comments & other stuffs), I need to do that again in the new theme. Finally Sabur vai choose a theme from the wordpress collection, and that was – Green Marinée.

Hmm.. okay, but Green Marinée is not a widgetized theme. So I first had to widgetize the theme. As I am using some widget plugins, widgetizing the theme was required. Automattic has a tutorial on how to widgetize a theme.

Hmm.. okay, but Green Marinée has no horizontal menubar. This site should have a horizontal menubar on top, simple pages/links in the sidebar will not be noticeable. So, I had to change the CSS too.

It was quite a hectic task for me, I did not need to do these stuffs if I was using the old widgetized theme. Somehow at last I quite managed to finish it all on 19th. But still some small modifications are needed. Hopefully the site will go live within this week.