Creating portfolio page – images broken

• jaysun

  said

  I know there’s a lot of posts about the Portfolio page and Timbthumb on here, I’ve tried to resolve this by reading many of them.

  But this seems different, I’ve created my portfolio page, category and posts.

  If you look at this link http://www.gepsolutions.co.uk/installation-portfolio/ the place holders are broken and part of the image is placed underneath the placeholder.

  If I go directly to timthumb I get

  “A TimThumb error has occured

  The following error(s) occured:
  Could not create the index.html file – to fix this create an empty file named index.html file in the cache directory.
  No image specified

  Query String :
  TimThumb version : 2.8.10″

  But the index.html file is there and the directory has 777 permissions.

  Any ideas?

• jeffw

  said

  Well, the first idea (as always) is to open your browser’s Error Console to see what messages there might be:

  Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 400 (Bad Request) -http://www.gepsolutions.co.uk/wp-content/themes/parallelus-traject/includes/timthumb.php?src=../images/content/placeholder-(250x160).gif&w=250&h=160&zc=1

  We know from experience that when you get 400 Bad Request errors with TimThumb then the cause is related to bad permissions on your server. In 100% of the reports we’ve had about this, eventually the customer got the message, sorted out their permissions and got on with their lives. Note that some paranoid web hosts have mod_security setup in such a way that prevents the TimThumb script from working, and so to change this particular server permission you may need to contact your web hosts.

  In most cases files should have 644 permissions, folders should have 755 permissions. If 755 doesn’t work for folders then try 777.

  (And make sure that you deactivate ALL plugins and third-party scripts while you troubleshoot else you could spend hours, days even chasing your own tail.)

• jaysun

  said

  Thanks Jeff, I thought it might be a permissions problem from the server, I’ve checked everything else…

  Time to speak to the ‘Server Guys’ lol

• jaysun

  said

  In case it helps someone else out there:

  I never got to the bottom of the issue here, tried on a different server with a new copy of Wordpress and Traject theme – so not sure what the deal is.

  However… although I couldn’t get the portfolio page to work correctly I could recreate it using ‘styled images shortcode’ by using this modification:

  In timthumb.php if you change

  define (‘FILE_CACHE_DIRECTORY’, ‘./cache’);

  to this:

  define (‘FILE_CACHE_DIRECTORY’, ”);

  The inline documentation explains that leaving this blank will allow the script to use the system temporary directory.

  Works for me, might work for anyone else struggling too

• jeffw

  said

  Hi, jaysun.

  Thanks for following up.

  FWIW, the fix you came up with suggests that the original issue was indeed with the server not allowing that cache folder to be written to.

  Parallelus has sold more than 10,000 themes with TimThumb in use and fewer than 0.05% ever have a problem with TimThumb. The initial setup and permissions for most servers seems to be working out of the box. Unfortunately, there is no method to set the permissions automatically.

• jaysun

  said

  Thank you for trying to help though, I understand it’s quite frustrating trying to diagnose something that should work and generally does work…. in my case I need to persuade my company to move their site to a new server, as I’m have problems all over the place and have no access to the server.

  If you ever see a support request from me though – it’s after I’ve spent the day researching the problem on several hundred websites and still failed lol