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I am not sure if this is the right place to ask this but

Hi

I am not sure if this is the right place to ask this but hopefully somebody here can help.

I have a membership site built on Wishlist Member which has a Forum using Simple Press forum plugin.

We have added the Simple Press Subscription plugin which should allow forum members to subscribe to topics and forums and receive emails when there have been new posts.

However, it does not seem to be working. I have spoken with SP and the Plugin developers who say that it is not the plugin, rather a wordpress issue.

I have also installed, on their recommendation, the plugin HGK SMTP but this hasn't not fixed things either

Members do seem to get 'password' reset emails. So some emails are being sent by wordpress ok.

I am now at a bit of a loss on how to fix things and it is mission critical for my site.

Any advice greatly appreciated. Thanks Jon

  • Imperative Ideas

    Hey Attrition,

    Unless your site is obscenely large, I would clone it across to a different host and see if it functions there. That's way easier than it sounds.

    1. Set up an alternate hosting site, right down to your domain name, as though you plan on actually moving there. Add a database to MySQL. I realize that you cannot access the front end of this test site, we'll get to that.

    2. Zip up your wp-content directory and download it

    3. Export your database using WP Migrate DB, keeping the domain the same but specifying the new path.

    Now we make the magic happen. We need to edit your hosts file so that your computer (and only your computer) thinks that the site is at the new location. Please refer to this tutorial for how to access that file.

    4. Add your new IP followed by your site's name to the bottom of the hosts file. For example, if you were setting up the test on my VPS you would add:

    96.30.35.92 yourdomain.com

    You should now be able to FTP into your alternate account and reach it by typing yourdomain.com into the browser. In essence, you have bypassed the Internet's DNS. To undo this change, just put a # in front of the host entry to comment it out.

    #96.30.35.92 yourdomain.com

    5. Upload your wp-content zip to the new site, along wtih a copy of WordPress, and a wp_config.php file that has the correct DB information. Other than the DB name/location/pass the rest of the file should be identical. You may need to clone your .htaccess as well, depending on your setup.

    6. Using PHPMyAdmin or a similar tool, import the .sql or .zip file you exported in step 3.

    7. You should now be able to access your staging site at the actual domain and test to see if it works. To go back to the official site, again, just comment out the host. In some systems, you may need to quit and re-open your browser.

    ---

    So why are we doing all of this?

    For one thing, it's always a good idea to have a warm backup ready to go in case your site goes down. That way, all you need to do is push across your latest DB backup (on an active site, you should automatically take them once an hour and save about 50 of them). There's an extra step to manually update the path but if your site goes down in flames, it's nice when we're talking about one step and a DNS flip instead of an all day panic.

    Mostly though, we want to see if a different host has the same mail problems. It may seem like overkill but it's the fastest way to find out if this is a plugin issue or a hosting issue.

  • Imperative Ideas

    I realize I forgot to mention this --

    96.30.35.92 yourdomain.com http://www.yourdomain.com

    (there is no http on that second one, just the www; WPMUDev's forum code is getting smart with us)

    This is probably how you want to set that up, with both the naked and www variants pointed.

    In addition, I typically point a subdomain mask at the old IP and the new IP as well so

    live.yourdomain.com -- live site IP
    dev.yourdomain.com -- dev site IP

    That way I can quickly grab any files I forgot to bring without having to flip my hosts file back and forth.

Thank NAME, for their help.

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