I’ve posted two new articles a few days ago. Their sole purpose was to test the Clean Trunks plugin in the MU environment. It appears as though it will not work without some modification.
The first, most obvious trouble seems to be that Clean Trunks needs to be kept in its own directory, and cannot have the two component files dumped into the /plugins directory on their own. If I put the plugin component files directly into the /plugins directory, the plugin engaged enough to pop an error message stating “the second argument was invalid in file clean_trunks.php on line 121. That seems to suggest that the call to create the object isn’t working correctly, causing this line to be in error:
if( in_array( $word, $this->stopwords ) ){
I take this to mean that the object that the $this variable refers to does not have the stopwords variable defined or that the object is not getting created. I’m not sure. I didn’t get a chance to work on this problem, specifically this weekend.
What I have done was to install the Plugin Manager plugin off the WPMUDEV.org site. This plugin makes it possible to globally activate or deactivate plugins in individual blogs. This brought up an interesting question for which I have found the confusing answer here. Namely, what is the difference between the /plugins folder and the /mu-plugins folder?
The answer is that the /mu-plugins folder is meant to contain plugins which are turned on globally with no options available to individual blog administrators or users. The /plugins folder is meant to contain plugins which are globally *available* but not turned on unless the blog administrator chooses to do so. However, in order for the blog administrator to make these choices, an option under Site Administration must be turned on that allows for a “Plugins” heading in the Administration Panel.
Whoopha! That’s a little confusing. Especially given the fact that plugins for the MU environment seem to be hit-or-miss, with little to no documentation. Some work in one directory but not the other, when really, you’d want to have the option to use both in this environment. I know I’ve been doing it wrong for the last week, myself. I’m going to need to rethink how things work, but really, going forward I would like to write plugins that take into account which directory it is installed in and provides appropriate options for both.
But I’ve got a lot to learn. Unlike my previous adventures with WordPress, this time, I’m trying to really get a handle on how the core works, if only in outline form. To that end, I have used grep on a Linux box I have to search out every instance of the do_action() keyword, documenting all the actions associated with WordPress MU. I now have a complete list of those actions, along with the files that reference them. I’ll eventually be putting together a Wiki to provide them here, but I’ve been having a bit of difficulty in loading the MediaWiki.
