NOT a Guru!
Keeping it simple, without the hype. PC tips and Internet advice for mom and pop businesses.
Keeping it simple, without the hype. PC tips and Internet advice for mom and pop businesses.
The new magazine-style Wordpress themes that have been coming out lately are sleek. These content management systems transform your blog into a professional looking online publication.
Part of what makes these magazine style blogs look so sharp are the images. The excerpts to articles that appear on the front page, the category indices and so forth have perfectly uniform thumbnails. The articles themselves have the original, larger images.
To create the fashionable look using thumbnails, most — not all — of the themes work with something called TimThumb.php. You’ll find that this is true on both paid and free magazine style Wordpress templates. TimThumb creates thumbnails “on the fly” for your article summaries.
Additionally, many of the themes use a large image for the featured stories that appear on the front page of the blog.
How to Make Blog Thumbnails Work Correctly.
The next few NotGuru articles are for people who have not worked with TimThumb before and who may be frustrated because their thumbnails aren’t showing or the features look weird.
The documentation provided with themes that employ TimThumb is usually not very explicit. It just says “chmod your cache to 777.” It might be a bit more complicated than that, especially if your other permissions are not set correctly.
Proper File and Folder Permissions (CHMOD).
As you know, to edit your Wordpress template, it needs to be writable. Using the file manager from the control panel, here’s a glance at the basic structure of a Wordpress blog. Shown in the screen shot is the wp-content folder. Note that the themes folder has a file permission of 755.
This next screen shot shows the contents of the wp-content/themes folder. You will see that all of the themes packages (i.e., Influx, PureType and so forth) have 755 file permissions.
This next screen shot shows the permissions that are set within a theme that uses TimThumb. Note that the cache folder is set at 777, images are set at 644, and the includes and javascript are set at 755. You can also set the images at 755 — the theme should still work.
If you do not have your file permissions set correctly, your TimThumb will not work correctly. Either your thumbnails won’t show at all or you will get “blank squares” where the images should be located.
Tomorrow, we will work with the features and other images.
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sounds interesting. thank you for sharing it I appreciate your effort for this site.
ahhhhhh permissions. Thanks for taking the time to go through that, I always come unstuck when it comes to permissions and setting these things up.