WPZOOM Academica Homepage Slideshow question

One more thing, I have the featured images set for the slides and I put the pictures on the the pages of the slides just to be safe.

OK I didn’t go to bed. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. When it comes to tackling coding problems, I’m like a fracking Roman legion.

And I GOT IT!

I did all of the above and checked everything at least three times. Nothing worked. Then I suddenly remembered something … just a wild guess. I placed an .htaccess file into the theme’s script folder — i.e., /wp-content/themes/academica/scripts/ — with these rewrite rules:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule .* – [E=HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE:%{HTTP:If-Modified-Since}]
RewriteRule .* – [E=HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH:%{HTTP:If-None-Match}]

And man, suddenly the timthumb cache folder (that I had created, see my comment above) fills up with generated thumbs, and the slides are displayed on the homepage!

Can’t tell what the problem was: my guess is that there’s a serious flaw in the theme’s installation script.

But now I can go to sleep. (It’s 8 a.m. now haha). Thanks everybody for your advice! And maybe someone will find this solution useful. But maybe not: it looks like we all have the same problem, but each of us needs different solutions. Decidedly weird.

Yes, there is something wrong with the theme, that’s for sure. I can’t pinpoint exactly what I did that fixed it, but it works and that’s all that matters.

Thanks a bunch gyokusai! So, in essence, to make the slideshow work I have to do the following:

1.)
Open /functions/wpzoom-functions.php and find these lines (#328):

Code:
echo get_category_parents($cat, TRUE, ‘ ‘ . $delimiter . ‘ ‘);

Replace with:

Code:
if ($cat) {
echo get_category_parents($cat, TRUE, ‘ ‘ . $delimiter . ‘ ‘);
}

2.)
Quote from gyokusai:
I placed an .htaccess file into the theme’s script folder — i.e., /wp-content/themes/academica/scripts/ — with these rewrite rules:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule .* – [E=HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE:%{HTTP:If-Modified-Since}]
RewriteRule .* – [E=HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH:%{HTTP:If-None-Match}]

3.)
Checked if WP “Reading” settings “Front page displays” is set to “your latest post”.

4.)
Enabled Slideshow in WPZOOM settings “Homepage Options” & set a static page.

5.)
Click “Add a New Slide”.

6.)
Create title for the slide.

7.)
Upload picture/photo via “Set featured image” under “Featured Image” panel.

8.)
Click on “Use as featured image”.

9.)
Repeat steps 5 to 8 for any additional slides.

Did I missed out anything?

Onyx, I don’t think you missed anything but in case it still doesn’t work, two things come to mind (one trivial, one less so):

Trivial (I’m sure you thought of that):
WPZOOM/settings/Home page Options:
Slide Show to “yes”, choose number of slides
Static Page “yes, choose page (“Home” is good choice, if it doesn’t exist, make one)

Not so trivial:
Go to this folder: /wp-content/themes/academica/scripts/
make sure you have the latest timthumb.php version (for security reasons)
– if not, get it here: https://code.google.com/p/timthumb/
check if there’s a cache folder within the “script” folder
– I added a “temp” folder for good measure but I don’t think that’s necessary
Make sure this “cache” folder is set to 777
– try 755 in case your server is set to ignore 777 for security reasons
check if your “wp-content”, “themes,” & “academica” folders have at least 755

If all fails, you should also check if the “script” and “cache” folders and the “timthumb.php” file have the same “Owner” like most of the other files (that’s often your FTP User ID; generated files within a given folder often have a different owner, i.e., “www-data”).

If it still fails, access your server’s infophp.php file (in your browser) and check if the GD library is enabled! (It really should be, but even stranger things have happened.)

Best of luck!

I appreciate your detailed response gyokusai, just one more question though, all these are accomplished on WordPress ver 3.3 or 3.2?

Sadly, as my provider only runs MySQL 4.1.22 on their servers, I can’t update to WP 3.2 or 3.3. I’m running the lastest WP version that doesn’t need a MySQL 5 upgrade, which is WP 3.1.4.

gyokusai – Thank you.

For me in the end it was the timthumb.php that needed updating, however, i did follow your instructions. All Works now!! Yippee
WP3.3.1

??

I must be a complete newbie… I’ve done everything (as far as I know) that this thread has to offer. Also tried to reinstall everything with no luck – keep getting the problem. After using incredible amount of hours I can only conclude that I must be doing some of the steps wrong.

I got the code for timthump and went to my ftp client, opened the timthump file and updated the code.

Did the same for the echo get_category fix so the code looked like this: } elseif ( is_year() ) {
echo $currentBefore . get_the_time(‘Y’) . $currentAfter;

} elseif ( is_single() ) {
if (!is_attachment()) {
$cat = get_the_category(); $cat = $cat[0];
if ($cat) {
echo get_category_parents($cat, TRUE, ‘ ‘ . $delimiter . ‘ ‘);
}
echo $currentBefore;
the_title();
echo $currentAfter; }

I named the slides “Slide-1, Slide-2 …Slide-5”

I found the .htaccess in my root folder and have the following code:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* – [E=HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE:%{HTTP:If-Modified-Since}]
RewriteRule .* – [E=HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH:%{HTTP:If-None-Match}]
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

All my ftp folders are 755

Finally I don’t have any cache folder in my directory… is this something I need to create manually or is it a mistake if it isn’t there?

Since it seems like people have gotten success after trying the advices from this thread, I suspect that I’m messing up in the system. Could anybody verify specifically what the custom field should say and if you need to do something on the page you want the slider.

I really really hope that somebody can offer me the last needed advice as my frustration has reached mountain high. Anybody with Skype and the 30 minutes to spare would also be greatly appreciated.

I would just like to say thank you to all that have contributed to this thread it resolved my problems.

Using WordPress 3.3.2 and the latest Academica theme 1.2.2:

I had to add the latest timthumb.php due to featured image in posts not displaying, also changed the code in the wpzoom-functions.php and it’s all working. Had to do some image editing to get slide image to display correctly but that was a minor issue.

Thanks again, Geoff.

Now I am having problem with academica theme 1.2.2 slideshow , it shows only featured image in slide show, i have also added latest version of timthumb.php, can any one tell me about how to create slideshow,
geaves can you tell me what minor changes you made in image editing?

Hi, basically just resized the image file, or ‘cut out’ a section of the image and created a new one, but all the images are a different size on my site, just checked the image sizes on a couple of the slides.

As there is only one image on each slide/page and that is the featured image, then that is correct.

If you read all the posts particulary the additional code to the wpzoom-function.php, and this:
WPZOOM/settings/Home page Options:
Slide Show to “yes”, choose number of slides
Static Page “yes, choose page (“Home” is good choice, if it doesn’t exist, make one)
Also in Settings/Reading make sure that Front page displays ‘Your latest post’ is checked, so do not select a home/front page in here.

Hi geaves,
your trick
As there is only one image on each slide/page and that is the featured image, then that is correct.
worked for me but beside it i also followed all the instructions given before like function.php modification,placement of .htacess file and WPZOOM/settings/Home page Options,
so a BIG thanks to you.

Hi guys,

I really hope someone can help me, i’ve followed all the steps but have had no luck whatsoever

there is one step i havent been able to do and its accessing this:

functions/wpzoom-functions.php

please can someone help?

thank you!