[Amanda Wentworth]

Hello!

I’ve just run into a problem trying to invite multiple members to any given group. While I can invite one member at a time with no issue, as soon as I add a second invite and try to press the “Send Invites” button, I get kicked to a WP error message that reads: “There has been a critical error on your website.” I’ve been able to replicate this issue across all group types.

This isn’t an urgent issue for me, as I can still invite members one at a time, but I wanted to bring it up to the community 🙂

Thank you!

~Amanda

[Bree]

Hi Amanda,

Thanks for the report!

I’m unable to reproduce the issue you’ve described. Just a few additional questions:

• Are you inviting existing members of your CBOX OpenLab community? Or, are you trying to invite new people to become members of the community and your group?
• Are all your core plugins up to date (which would include the Invite Anyone plugin responsible for group invites)?

Thanks!

Bree

[Amanda Wentworth]

Hi Bree,

It seems that this has been magically resolved! I’m sorry about the confusion.

To answer your questions, though, I was inviting existing members to my groups, and my core plugins are, indeed, all up to date. I’m so relieved this was just a fluke incident and is not more widespread!

Thanks,

Amanda

[Bree]

Hi Amanda,

No problem! Thanks for the follow up and I’m happy to hear about the magical resolution!

Bree 🙂

[Ed Beck]

Hi Bree,

Intermittent errors make me even more nervous than repeatable errors so I pulled the logs: Does this give you more information?

[09-Oct-2020 18:19:31 UTC] PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught Error: Class 'PHPMailer' not found in /home/sunycreate/geneseo.sunycreate.cloud/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core/classes/class-bp-phpmailer.php:91
Stack trace:
#0 /home/sunycreate/geneseo.sunycreate.cloud/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core/bp-core-functions.php(3233): BP_PHPMailer->bp_email(Object(BP_Email))
#1 /home/sunycreate/geneseo.sunycreate.cloud/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-groups/bp-groups-notifications.php(365): bp_send_email('groups-invitati...', 6, Array)
#2 /home/sunycreate/geneseo.sunycreate.cloud/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-groups/classes/class-bp-groups-invitation-manager.php(55): groups_notification_group_invites(Object(BP_Groups_Group), 6, 1)
#3 /home/sunycreate/geneseo.sunycreate.cloud/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core/classes/class-bp-invitation-manager.php(197): BP_Groups_Invitation_Manager->run_send_action(Object(BP_Invitation))
#4 /home/sunycreate/geneseo.sunycreate.cloud/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-groups/bp-groups-functions.php(1718): BP_Invitation_Ma in /home/sunycreate/geneseo.sunycreate.cloud/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core/classes/class-bp-phpmailer.php on line 91

[Ray]

Hi Amanda and Ed,

Since the last CBOX release, WordPress 5.5 was released and BuddyPress made a compatibility update.

Can you manually update BuddyPress to the latest version?
https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress/

This should address the fatal error that Ed mentioned above.

If you want to update BuddyPress through the WordPress admin dashboard, you’ll need to toggle Expert Mode temporarily. Read more about this here: https://commonsinabox.org/technical-guide-maintenance

[Ed Beck]

Thanks for that info Ray,

Can you give me a little more information about Commons in a Box’s upgrade strategy?

My limited understanding is that as a program that is meant for College and University settings, you have tried to make it so that Commons in a Box releases new major releases approximately according to the semester schedule, and does limited bug fixes during the course of a semester as point releases so as not to introduce new features.

Sometimes when we bring bugs forward on this forum or directly on github, we get hot-fixes that we can apply on our servers or advice like this to enable expert mode temporarily.

Suppose we didn’t want to do a hot-fix manually or we didn’t want to engage Expert mode and update BuddyPress Manually. How long would it take this fix to get pushed out through a simple plugin update?

[Boone Gorges]

Can you give me a little more information about Commons in a Box’s upgrade strategy?

You’re correct that we try to keep university schedules in mind. We are unlikely, for example, to push major new features or other large changes in September; we’d instead try to get this kind of release out during the summer, to give users time to plan.

Apart from our “major” releases – such as version 1.2.0 a few months back – we have “maintenance” releases. These are focused on bug fixes, compatibility updates (such as for WordPress 5.5), and other small issues. Because maintenance releases are designed to be non-disruptive, we don’t schedule these around academic calendars.

In an ideal world, we would release bug fixes immediately. But the release process is resource-intensive for our team, including time for testing and for the packaging process. As such, we must bundle together fixes in maintenance releases that come out every couple of months. We don’t have a set schedule for this – it depends in part on the severity of the bugs that are pending a fix – but we try to do at least one maintenance release per semester.

Outside of these official CBOX releases, hotfixes (or targeted “expert” updates to plugins like BP) are the only way to stay on the bleeding edge.

Thanks for your patience.

[Ed Beck]

Thanks for the information:

I just want to explain why I am asking. Amanda and I are kind of bleeding edge people. We are testing out OpenLab basically on our own in our Universities with a small core of early adopters that are patient and understand that small issues may happen. Right now we do all the maintenance on the servers and quite frankly we are willing to do some of those more time-consuming fixes because we see the potential in this and are “open” people.

At the end of our pilot, we are going to have to make recommendations. For example, my Education Department might be looking for a new student portfolio system at the end of the year, and I am looking to get OpenLab at least considered alongside the commercial solutions they will no doubt want to see. If something like that would happen, with much more widespread use, the backend of the OpenLab would probably get taken away from me and given to the experts in IT, and I know from experience that they have much more conservative opinions on making changes in production and would definitely shy away from manually editing lines of code.

So what I think I learned from this is that I have to be really careful when upgrading OpenLab, and triple check that the WordPress Version doesn’t get ahead of exactly when you released the OpenLab version. (I think the confusion this time was just that they were both released so near to each other that I didn’t pay attention to what came out first)

[Charlie Edwards]

Thanks, Ed, for sharing this. Boone may have further words of wisdom around releases, but just to say that, if it would be helpful, we would be glad to meet with you and Amanda to hear more about what you’re doing, and share our experiences with the OpenLabs at City Tech (original OpenLab) and BMCC (https://openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu/; uses CBOX OpenLab). But no pressure at all, of course! 🙂 (email: cedwards@citytech.cuny.edu)

[Amanda Wentworth]

Hi Charlie,

Thanks for reaching out! I’d be happy to schedule a Zoom call with you, Ed, myself, and some other folks from our team at various SUNY institutions (about 4 additional guests). We’d love to hear about your experience with OpenLabs at City Tech and are enthusiastic to learn more about the full potential for OpenLab! We’d so appreciate your time.

[Charlie Edwards]

Excellent – we’d be delighted to do this! Let’s shift to email to sort out the logistics!

[Paul Schacht]

Just want to hop onto this thread for a moment to say that I’ve been working with Ed and Amanda on this project and couldn’t be more excited about it. At SUNY Geneseo, Amanda and I have taken the lead on building a new Center for Digital Learning, and we see multiple ways for CBOX-OL to help us accomplish some of the center’s goals. I’m a longtime CBOX Classic user (and grateful beneficiary of its support forum!) and I was a tester for CBOX-OL when it was in development. I appreciate the opportunity to learn how campuses who’ve been using CBOX-OL for a while are dealing with the infrastructural questions Ed has raised.

[Charlie Edwards]

That’s so great to hear, Paul! We’re excited that you’re excited and are really looking forward to the conversation.

[Author]

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