Several issues running WP on Debian Lenny (SOLVED)

Hi! I’ve been experiencing some issues that I have to struggle to fix them but finally I have my copy of WP working on my Debian Lenny installation so I want to share what I did just in case someone has the same issues.

First thing: I started running an older version of WP (the Lenny packaged one) and some days later I realized I had the backported version 3.0.2 (that in some few days more became 3.0.4. So now I’m running a 3.0.4, the lastest stable version in my Debian.

Debian users should add a new repository to their sources.list; check backports.debian.org for more info.

Now, I had a recurrent problem both in 3.0.2 and in 3.0.4 and it’s this: some buttons in the wp-admin interface didn’t work correctly. Let’s say for example, the HTML mode in the posts and pages editor didn’t switch (it showed up grayed). The google libraries plugin fixed that but took away the wysiwyg mode, so it didn’t work for me.

The fix for this was to remove the wp-include and wp-admin directories complete and replace them with the original but not from the Debian package again but from the tarball you can download directly from www.ads-software.com. This worked for me and solved definitely the problem (none of the other solutions I found online worked, and I tried everything).

Ok so or it’s Debian package bugged since the stable version or my installation was screwed up, anyway this fixed it.

Second thing: not a problem with debian itself but a thing I wanted to add. My site/blog has 2 related groups/pages on facebook and I wanted the Like boxed to show on the sidebar. I found a plugin that does that but it just allow you to add it once (and I needed two). There was two solutions afaik, one was to edit code and add the second one manually. When I was doing that I found out that there was an older plugin “Fan Box” that did exactly the same, so two plugins = two fb pages, and that’s it.

The plugins named are:
Facebook Like Box
Facebook Fan Box

The last problem I had was with images: suddenly the avatars for the members (I’m using a plugin called buddypress that works like facebook but for your site) gone away, no images but the files were on the server, I saw them!
I had changed the header image with a custom one I made and it showed up blank too, no image. And checking on the server files, the image was there!

Well, the problem was with the accesibility of the upload folder, so check where are you pointing the upload folder and try to access it from the browser, if you can’t, wordpress can’t either. There is a config file setting, $upload_something that forces this, and also a configuration on the wp-admin interface. The last thing is to check on your web server set up that that folder is accesible and available.

Hope this helps someone that ran into the same issues and hopefully he/she resolves it faster than me ??

Have a great week,
Gustavo