OnePress Community

As WordPress site administrators, attacks by spammers can be quite debilitating to all the hard work put in on your web sites. When building a community with OnePress theme framework or using the core WordPress functionalities, it’s important that the individuals who sign up for your site are real users and are going to add value to your community.

If you have your WordPress configured such that anyone can register, then this plug-in is for you!

The WordPress registration process requires providing a valid email address and using a password sent to that email address to login for the first time. While this is indeed a deterrant, it’s only one line of defense in the war against spammers.

When using the OnePress framework to build a community site, we recommend setting the option so that user’s must be registered to comment. This reduces spam quite significantly but what’s to stop [human] spammers from taking the extra step and getting the password from their email, only to bombard your blog with meaningless comments. Here’s where the OnePress Akismet for Accounts plug-in comes in.

What we have accomplished is a manner in which Akismet can be used to filter out those individuals registering or logging into your site. Using the Akismet spam filtering API, the user’s credentials are submitted to the service, and based on their response, the user is denied access to the site or allowed to proceed as per usual. This is an incredibly effective service and great way to keep only the users who really matter active on your site. The plug-in options allow you to choose if you would like Akismet filtering turned on for registration, login, both or neither.

Also, this plug-in provides an interface for flagging users as hammers or spammers after they have signed up. Much of Akismet’s power comes from the amount of data the service collects from administrator’s marking comments as spam or not spam. Well now, as an administrator, you can denote whether a user is a spammer (negative user) or a hammer (positive user) and other site owner’s will benefit from your input.

Definitely check out this plug-in if you have the “anyone can register” option turned on, as it will help decrease the amount of spammers that join your site!

Download OnePress Akismet for Accounts OnePress Akismet for Accounts Plug-in source on Google Code

We’ve been busy here at PushButton Labs working on a number of improvements to OnePress Community. Feels like only appropriate to end a super productive week by releasing a new child theme for our WordPress theme framework. This theme, Bullseye, features art styling by Tim Aste with some great red accents throughout. We think it might be just the look you are going for with your site, so check it out! As always, there are great default feature, featurette, and thumbnail images included with this theme for getting your widgets going.

By the way, did you know that to get your phpBB forum to look great with this theme, you don’t need a new style at all. If you have the Greytouch phpBB theme installed, it will automatically react to your installation of Bullseye. Just make sure that when you activate “Bullseye” your /wp-content/themes/onepress/settings.inc.php file has been updated (should happen automatically but never hurts to double check.) Here’s what the $op_current_theme variable should look like:

        $op_current_theme = <<<EOT
bullseye
EOT;

This release provides a number of updates and fixes primarily for use of the phpBB integration (bridge.) A huge thanks to all the members of our community forum that have been critical in helping us identify and track down bugs. Many of the fixes in version 1.0.4 relate to users who have installed WordPress and phpBB in a number of different paths. Previously, code existed that was not completely sensitive to path variances and that has been ironed out and your OnePress installation should now work no matter when on your server WordPress and phpBB are installed. Release 1.0.4 also contains a fix for PHP4 servers that were not previously able to activate the OnePress phpBB module due to a compatibility issue.

Also, we have updated the presentation of the phpBB content widget so that it not only shows the forum title and author, but also the number of replies, number of views, and the author’s gravatar.

Release Notes

Deactivating phpBB module was still looking to phpBB when loading registration form. It now checks to make sure the phpBB module is active first. Account for whitespace when including wp-settings.php through eval chain that is used when logging in/out from phpBB. Fix for OP Recent Comments always displaying comment’s author name as “Anonymous.” Use is_callable instead of method_exists for PHP4 compatibility. This will allow servers running PHP4 to activate the phpBB module. Display for phpBB content widget improved and gravatar support added. Logging out when phpBB exists but is not installed or active was causing 404 error, logout process now looks for this case. Fixes for pathing issues when users installed WordPress in a subdirectory. Comments template “Logout” link needed a nonce attached it for WordPress 2.7 compatibility.

For step by step instructions on how to upgrade OnePress, please refer to our Upgrading OnePress Versions tutorial

The release of version 1.0.3 addresses some issues with navigation and phpBB integration.

When upgrading to 1.0.3 from a previous version of OnePress, you will need to go into your /wp-content/themes/onepress/ directory and remove nav.inc.php and create a file in the same directory called settings.inc.php, which will need to have its permissions set to be writeable (chmod to 666.) After creating, head over to the OnePress settings in your admin and “Save Changes” (this will generate settings.inc.php contents for your site.) Read more »

Presenting our first child theme for OnePress Community: Greytouch. The purpose of this theme was to provide a simple, yet elegant theme available for those of you looking to adopt OnePress Community for your site’s platform yet do not want to spend time, off the bat, creating a custom child theme. The color palette of this theme involves lots of blueish grays (hence the name) for a tasteful presentation for your site.

Down the road we will be providing and enabling more child themes; but, for the time being, enjoy Greytouch!