Well I and a few other people have been having a problem using the image field in Flexicontent. What we were getting was an error 500 and something about the MySQL server was gone. After some figuring out the conclusion was that the image processing was taking too long and causing MySQL to time out.
For me, I could upload small images, say 20kb or less and it worked fine. Anything larger and it was hit or miss, but mostly miss.
So figuring the problem was in the image processing script I looked for an alternative to phpThumb. Don't get me wrong, phpThumb is great. I've used it before on other sites without a hitch. I've had Flexicontent work fine on another host. But it seems some hosts are getting constrictive on their settings.
The problem with phpThumb? Well, the last release was over 2 years ago. And it's kind of bloated. So I found another image processing script called PHP THUMB, from Gen X Design. The script can be found here
Code:
http://phpthumb.gxdlabs.com/
So, what I've done is replaced phpThumb with PHP THUMB. The result was no more time out errors. For me my images were resized pretty quickly without any hitches and made Flexicontent usable once again.
Was it a perfect replacement...No. There are some changes, the follwing things were removed because the new library doesn't make use of them:
Maximum upload size
Image Quality
Watermark Opacity
What was added?
Watermark padding
Another processing method called Adaptive.
Adaptive processing? Well with the new script you still have the same old scale and crops(crops from the center of the image). Adaptive rescaling or just Adaptive will first rescale the image to as close to the size you specify and the crop off the rest to make it the size you specified. So a resize then crop.
Now I've made this into a complete installation of Flexicontent. While most of the changes are in the image plugin, there are some changes elsewhere. Such as the language files and one change the controller.php file in the admin section.
Ideally, it would be nice if the Flexicontent devs would maybe integrate this new image processing script and make it selectable as to which one you want to use. I could probably do it but if devs choose not to implement and a new version comes out then it's just more changes for me to do anyways. If the devs want to contact me to make the integration then I've got no problem with it. But I'm sure they're a whole lot better at it than I.
The installation is the same as normal. The post installation is the same except for the item that refers to setting the phpthumb cache. I couldn't figure out how to remove it from the Post installation, as it was not needed with the new script. You still have to click on it, however the little busy icon won't change as the process is no longer there. Once you've clicked all of the Post install updates just refresh as normal and it will disappear.
Normal disclaimer:
I make no claims that this will work flawlessly on your server. If you are using the latest version of Flexicontent and the image upload field works for you, then don't bother with this. If however, you're getting an error 500 when uploading an image to your item and want to give this a shot, then be my guest. I've tested this to the best of my abilities. I've uninstalled and reinstalled this numerous times on my server and it's worked every time...for me. It may or may not work for you. But hopefully it will.
You can download the component from here:
Code:
http://hotfile.com/dl/90688111/84f8cce/com_flexicontent_153c_stable_r354a.zip.html
You can check the change log for in the zip for changes I've made. For all general purposes I'm calling this 1.5.3c stable (r354a), just added the "a" to the end of the current release.
