Hello! Thanks so much for Tainacan, it’s a brilliant resource. I’m in the process of setting up a collection online for a small museum, running the Blocksy theme on Wordpress. However, I’m finding that my main images (uploaded to the ‘document’ section aren’t loading either in the back end or the front end (I’m getting just the alt-text in both cases). Thumbnails are loading fine in the masonry view for the main collections page. Alt-text is loading so pres
umably the images are loading in some form, but we can’t see them. I’ve cleared the cache on my browser and on wordpress. We did recently update Blocksy (2.1.14) but we were having problems with very slow load times before this. Any ideas would be very much appreciated! Screenshots attached. Thanks.
Hello, I hope this message finds you well. Although I’m new here, I’ve realized that old ways can still be a good solution for today’s colleagues. The report seems more like a compatibility issue with the theme and Tainacan, not with Tainacan itself. The suggestion is to always keep a copy for testing, make modifications or test it, and only then test it on your main database. In the test database, keep the default layout and only later change it to the desired layout. Take the opportunity to test other themes as well. It’s also a good idea to debug the desired functions or, if possible, check your web server log for errors. Best regards.
I don’t think this issue might be related to theme compability. Can you please provide a public link so we can inspect things to figure it out?
One possible guess is that the item is private and then the way Tainacan blocks private item attachments can be messing something… but let me first take a look at it, ok?
Thank you! I did try rolling back Blocksy to an earlier version but it doesn’t seem to have changed anything… The page has been private, but I’ve made it public temporarily - again it hasn’t changed anything. Here’s the link: https://theclockworks.org/collection-online Thanks again
Ah- I’ve found that the collections link from Tainacan (‘View collection on website’ / https://theclockworks.org/collections/collection-online) doesn’t actually bring any items up, which is why I access it through that link. All the items in my collection are public though so they should be showing.
Ok so now I can see the items and the images are loading fine in the items page. So my hypothesis stands: it may be related to how private images are protected in the server side. If both the collection and item are public, they appear, otherwise they are being blocked, even if you are logged in and are allowed to see.
At the top of this article there is an image that helps understanding what happens to image folders when the item is private (sorry the content is en Portuguese):
My guess is that your server is lacking permissions to either create those _x_ or maybe defining the redirection rules in .htaccess… Can you share with us your Tainacan System Diagnostics?
Thank you so much - this sounds likely. Here are the system diagnostics (I think) - although I won’t be able to do anything on the server side, as I’m not a web developer and we only have a very basic hosting provision at the moment. Is it desirable to have a web developer supporting Tainacan?
From your System Check screen, I would just recommend asking to your server administrator to install the Imagick module, it can be useful to generate cropped versions of the images.
But that is not the issue. After inspecting a bit more the HTML of your site I can see that the images are being loaded from another server, pointing to https://i0.wp.com. This is is probably some external storage strategy that your server uses to improve performance, which is ok. The issue is that if a wrong path is passed, for example:
Tainacan uses the site 404 template to identify that an image was not found in the expected, public path and then checks for the equivalent _x_ version of the path with extra permissions for the private items. This is why things are not working when private.
Unfortunately this is a bit technical and will require you to talk to your server administrator so they can fix this. Its not so much a matter of having a web developer, but whoever is managing the server. Tainacan assumes things are set according to certain standard behavior in your server and the lack of the traditional 404 redirect for not found images is unexpected for it.
I could do a small guess that this external storage strategy is implemented by some plugin (maybe Jetpack?) In that case we could try disabling it to see if it solves… otherwise I think you won’t be able to fix solely via WordPress Admin .
Thank you so much for all this - I’ve been trying to get our server administrator to install imagick for ages but they say it’s out of scope, so I think we might end up getting someone else in. But this is extremely helpful, thank you
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