Thesis Post Images and Thumbnails not working

Thesis is, in my view, the best WordPress theme for commercial sites but there can be a couple of niggles when it comes to installing it on a shared hosting platform such as, in my case, a Heart Internet Reseller account.

Thesis includes the facility to include a post image: this is an image that appears near the post title and which is then used as a thumbnail – obviously exactly how these appear is configurable within the Thesis options panel.

Installing for the first time on a shared space went fine until it came to specifying the Post Images which simply didn’t appear. After a good deal of digging around on the Thesis forum at DIY Themes and some experimentation, here’s the process I went through to fix the problems:

1. In notepad, create a file containing just these lines:
   < ?php
phpinfo();
?>
   FTP this file into the root folder of your website and then launch your browser and go to http://[yourdomainname]/phpinfo.php. This will bring up a whole heap of information about your PHP configuration. Use your browser’s search function to find the lines allow_url_fopen and allow_url_include. If allow_url_fopen is set to ON, then allow_url_include must also be ON. The chances are that allow_url_include is OFF and what you need to do is set allow_url_fopen to OFF also. This is easily done…
2. Open up Notepad and create a new file with just this one line:
   allow_url_fopen = off
3. Save this file as php5.ini (or, if you’ve left your domain set as PHP4 for some reason, this file should be called php.ini) and FTP it to the root folder of your site (usually something like /public_html or /httpdocs). This should sort out the post images issue but possible not the thumbnails
4. To fix the thumbnail issue, fire up your FTP program and find and select the following folders, right click and select File Permissions, then type the number shown into the dialog that appears. This allows Thesis to create the thumbnails:
   • /wp-content/themes/thesis_16/custom/cache/ (set to 755)
   • /wp-content/themes/thesis_16/lib/scripts/ (set to 755)
   • /wp-content/themes/thesis_16/lib/scripts/thumb.php (set to 744)

   Thanks to “pulselv” for this on the DIYThemes forum

5. Finally, click the “Big Ass Save Button” (or whatever you’ve renamed it to) on the Thesis Options screen. This makes Thesis take notice of the changes. All should now be well!

THESIS 1.7 UPDATE: I’ve found with Thesis 1.7 that you need to click the Save button on every one of the Thesis option pages. I suspect you, in fact, only have to click one but I clicked them all to be sure.