Reverse engineering Wordpress functionality

October 24, 2013 12:46 PM

I've been working on making a mirror of a site that we're using for another project. The original site is working fine, but a few of the custom tweaks that the former webmaster made aren't carrying over. One of these is a box on the post creation screen that allows / disallows others to remix (pictured at the link) your work. We're working off of a BuddyPress framework. Any ideas about how to find the template file that's calling this? More details inside...

Initially I started with a fresh installation of both Word and Buddy press.

We're using a custom theme that I designed based off of Frisco for Buddypress, which is itself a child theme of the default BP theme. None of the remix functionality was working at first, but after copying over the BP-Default theme folder from the functional version of the site it enabled half of the remix functionality (a button next to the post title which users can click on to remix stories - based off of a copy post plugin). This leads me to believe that the old webmaster made changes to stuff in the Buddypress plugin folder to implement this stuff, but I'm hesitant just copying over the whole BP folder to my new site because I don't want to mess stuff up.

All of the plugins from the old site have been copied over exactly to the new site.

Is there a template that would likely contain code to insert the box linked above? I'd like to just copy over a single file, if possible.

posted by codacorolla to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: I don't have firsthand experience with Buddypress, but I'd use a program that can search the text in all files in a folder to look for something relating to "remix." Notepad++ can do this, as well as (shhh...) Dreamweaver. I'm not sure about Mac-specific programs with that functionality. You can search starting at the parent theme's directory and set it to look in all subfolders. If the template code is self-documented or if the relevant functions have descriptive names it should turn up a few hits.

WordPress's template hierarchy permits a lot of flexibility, but it can lead to a proliferation of templates which makes this sort of thing really difficult.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 2:47 PM on October 24, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: That's an awesome idea - I'll give that a try tomorrow.
posted by codacorolla at 9:00 PM on October 24, 2013

Best answer: SublimeText is an excellent, free editor with great search function. Do a site wide search as suggested.
posted by humboldt32 at 3:05 AM on October 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I think that would have to be either a plugin or in functions.php for the active theme.
posted by artlung at 6:35 AM on October 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks to everyone for the help. I ended up using Notepad++ (since I was already familiar with it) to do a directory search of the back-up files I keep on my system. To follow up, it looks like I actually have all of the necessary contingent files, but there's a difference in the Wordpress or Buddypress core between when the custom plugin was created and the current version of the platform. Or, possibly, there's some other conflict that I'm not grasping...

It's something I'm going to put in the to-do pile since it's halfway working. You'll likely see another AskMe whenever I get around to trying to figure that out.
posted by codacorolla at 4:12 PM on October 29, 2013