This is a guest post by Kimberly who blogs at Just-ask-kim about blogging, WordPress and Social-media. If you like to write for Shoutmeloud do read: Shoutmeloud revenue sharing program.
The upgrade from Thesis 1.7 to Thesis 1.8 was one of those times for people that enjoy Thesis’ rotator function!
Back, prior to Thesis 1.6 the /rotator folder lived outside of the custom folder even though it was designed for customization. Once most people made the move to Thesis 1.6 and beyond they pretty much forgot about this folder until this new hiccup cropped up.
People that were running 1.7 or prior are occasionally finding that upon upgrading or migrating to Thesis 1.8 that their image rotator stops displaying images but remains displaying the image caption/titles of the custom rotator images.
Empty boxes with a few words was just not the desired effect!
Upon investigating a client site reporting this issue I found images in the folder named like this:
- a nice little house.jpg
- couple o’ greenbacks.jpg
- Power of the Molecular structure.jpg
- OS2Red.png
Now, for those unfamiliar with proper paths and url structures those may seem fine, but due to the spaces other characters (such as the apostrophe) they would not be considered a “nice” path structure.
While certainly less descriptive, changing these to short names was the solution for the jpgs!
- house.jpg
- greenbacks.jpg
- molecular.jpg
Apparently Thesis 1.7 was having no trouble escaping the spaces but for some odd reason changes in Thesis 1.8 had made these files not work correctly.
I was still unable to quickly get the .png to quickly come up. Now it may have in fact been there and just not cycling rapidly in the rotation when I checked, but I converted it to a .jpg using Paint.Net (could have used photoshop) and then it worked just fine.
OS2Red.png -> OS2Red.jpg
So, with those simple changes, we were able to get the Thesis 1.8 rotator to once again begin properly displaying custom images instead of empty boxes!
A search of google for “thesis 1.8 rotator images” showed that this was a problem for quite a few people so I thought a tutorial was in order. Hopefully this helps you or your clients if you run into this hiccup!
Have fun with Thesis!
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Yes Kimberly the structure in which we use ‘ etc can encounter such problems.
I think the real question here though is why was 1.7 able to escape all of the spaces and characters and 1.8 not able to. While technical individuals understand this, finding that escape functionality and re-adding it to 1.8 is in the benefit of the average joe end user that has no clue. Personally I’m really baffled that it worked in 1.7 but I know it did because I maintain that clients site although he uploaded his own images in this case and I hadnt double checked them till I did his 1.8 migration. Very peculiar! Thanks for commenting!
Kimberly
Hey Kim! Yay! Thanks for this. I ran across your post while I was preparing to upgrade to Thesis 1.8. Once I’d upgraded, 2 of my rotator photos did exactly what you described here. All I did was right click, rename and remove the spaces, and they worked fine. Thank you SO MUCH!!
Debby
Awesome! Yay! Glad to hear it helped you out. I’d LOVE to know why they worked in the first place like that since they should not have. I wonder who had wrote some compensating code that got removed because they forgot why it was there. I wouldnt even have thought it was possible! Glad you got it working hun and thanks for the shoutout!
Kimberly
Ah! Thanks so much for this post. Definitely helped me out.
Thanks for that quick fix! You don’t happen to know if there is a way of removing sidebars from specific posts rather than pages do you. I’ve spent hours looking for the answer.
Thanks SO much Kimberley! That cures my problem I’ve had for a week now. Hasn’t looked to pretty but its all fixed now!
Thanks!
You da (wo)man!!!! Fixed my problem!