So Your Arthemia Premium Theme isn’t Generating Thumbnails

The Colorlabs Project puts out a very reasonably priced, very customizable theme called Arthemia Premium. It’s an excellent magazine theme with loads of features, including automatic image resizing (your choice, through custom field or automatic resizing of the first image in each post!) to generate thumbnails that show on the main page.

Unfortunately, many users experience difficulty getting this sought-after feature to work properly.  Typically, the trouble can be explained in one of two ways:

1. Your images are not hosted on your own server. You can’t link to images from Flickr, Photobucket or any other external image source. If all of your images are from external sources, never fear – you can use the Hot Linked Image Cacher plugin to get them all back on your server in a few clicks.
2. The permissions on the arthemia-premium/scripts and arthemia-premium/scripts/cache folders, as well as arthemia-premium/scripts/timthumb.php are set incorrectly.

If your issue is #1, run the plugin and you’ll (hopefully) be all set. If your issue is #2, you’re looking at something that could potentially be tricky to track down and figure out.  First, check out a few things via FTP:

1. Are any files being generated in the arthemia-premium/scripts/cache directory? That’s where the script places your thumbnail images after they are generated. If this directory is empty, then the script either a) isn’t running or b) is running but generating some sort of error. If you aren’t running a new/beta version of Arthemia, and you haven’t made any modifications to the script or Arthemia functions, you can safely assume that the issue isn’t b) the script running but generating an error. Your script probably isn’t running.This was the issue when I developed the MomActive website. I had tried every trick listed in the support forums to no avail. The thumbnails weren’t generating. A new install of the theme didn’t help either. I knew the issue HAD to be with the permissions of my folders and files, so I got to work searching out every single post and comment I could about this issue on Arthemia. I finally found this thread, which led me to the configuration I needed.Turns out that on FatCow, the way the server permissions are set must take issue with a CHMOD 777 permission (that is, when you right-click on the folder in Filezilla, choose Permissions, and change that number to 777 – giving everyone and everything read/write access to the files and directories). I had changed these values to 777 on the advice of the support forums and also as directed in the theme tutorial, but for this host, it was a no go. The TimThumb script wasn’t being permitted to execute and when I right-clicked on my thumbnail image placeholders, I was getting a 500 Internal Server Error.The trick in this case was to change the Scripts and Cache folders to CHMOD 755, and the TimThumb script file (timthumb.php) to 666. As soon as I did that, every single image loaded. Worked like a charm!
2. If files are being generated in your scripts/cache folder, but not showing up on the site, you can try the permissions I detailed above, or also give the old CHMOD 777 permissions – on both directories (scripts and cache) as well as the timthumb.php file – a try. That might work, it’s worked for a lot of folks out there. Other variations I saw listed in comment sections were:Server Directory: CHMOD 777
   Cache Directory: CHMOD 777
   TimThumb.php: CHMOD 664

   Server Directory: CHMOD 755
   Cache Directory: CHMOD 755
   TimThumb.php: CHMOD 755

Hopefully by now, your images are looking sexy as thumbnails and your Arthemia theme is sleek and professional. If you’re still having trouble, feel free to contact me about Geek/Support Services.

Looking for a little eye candy? Take a peek at A Daily Dose of Toni and MomActive, two sites that I developed using customizations and the Arthemia Theme!