UPDATED: Version 2.8 released 11/14/05. Download now!
NOTE: Please note that this plugin doesn’t support WordPress 2.3. However, you can find a wonderful remake here that does.
Yay! After a lot of work, the new version of the Image Headline Plugin is available. This plugin was originally written by Joel Bennett but it’s come a long way since the beginning. New features in this version include:
- Excellent integration into the WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn administration interface.
- Gorgeous anti-aliased, soft shadows.
- Easier than ever to configure.
So, if you’re ready to take a gander, go on and tell me what you think. If you do end up using the plugin, please leave me a comment here with a link to your site so I can see the results! I’d love to see what you guys come up with.
644 Responses to “New Image Headline Plugin is finally ready”
This is great! It makes editing so much easier than with the old plugin. Now you need to make a plugin for your live preview, I have been trying to make one like yours, with the name and all, but haven’t figured it out… =)
I can’t get the plugin to find the fonts. I’ve created the folder, changed permissions, uploaded a TTF font. Still no luck. I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. Any ideas?
Did you try the standard bundled font and it didn’t work either? Where did you create the folder?
Nevermind…finally got it. No clue what it was though.
Gah! I was supposed to write up more on how that was done and I haven’t gotten around to it. Thanks for the reminder, I’ll get something written up soon. Most of it is in fact a plugin, there’s just a little bit extra that must be done.
Yeah, I tried doing it myself, like I said, and ended up using ALOT of else statements, and the preview couldn’t keep up and it slowed the whole the forms down.
And just one more quick question, what is the template tag for comment numbers? I see you have them counting the comments in each post, but everytime I try to do that, I only get the comments ID number… =\
You are to good. =P
I had it working on a test site. Was working great. Moved it all over to my live install and now none of the png files will display. They are being created on the server (verified with FTP) and the img tags are being put in the HTML. Doesn’t make sense to me…any ideas? The test image doesn’t show in the admin either, but no errors.
I see the image tags and if I try to copy the path to the image and just load that URL I get a 404 error. Double check that your cache_url points at where your cache_folder exists.
Wow….I had an extra “s” and it was “images-headlines”. I don’t know how many times I’ve looked at that! Sometimes a simple reminder does the trick. Thanks! Great plugin!
Hey, your Tarball download is 404…
Back in place, thanks Chad.
Absolutely wonderful. I’m using it right now.
BTW, this trackback thing in my WP installation must be horribly broken…
No problem. I actually found the 2.1 zip file. I’m persistent! However, transparent backgrounds don’t seem to be happening. Not that I’m complaining, because the effects are gorgeous so far! You can see the effect on my page at http://www.pirate-king.com. Although I’ll d/l the tar to see if there is any difference!
Really nice plugin, just installed it on my site: http://sean.journeypix.com
Just one thing, I feel that the gap between the headline and the text is a bit large now, is it possible to do something with that?
The margin around the text is already managed pretty tightly. I downloaded one of your generated images — My Name Lon – You Like Me — and there’s only two pixels you could argue that could be cropped.
Your space between title and text results from two main things: your post-content selector has a 1em top pad which separates the main text from the title image, then you have a 5 pixel pad on all images which further separates it. By reducing your 1em pad on the post-content and defining a “.post-info img { padding: 0; }” style to handle your image titles I think you’ll have the spacing you want.
Stunning! I adore the proper shadows, too.
My only whinge is that when I was trying it on an off-white background (#eed), it didn’t quite match the background it was sitting on, but I suspect Safari is to blame for that.
I do wish IE were more reliable.
Apparently support for transparency finally happened a couple of weeks ago?
Miss P., Also try tweaking the shadow settings just right… Even the most littlest of color changes to the shadows color(s) can drastically change the way it looks on other backgrounds.
I didn’t use the shadows at all, unfortunately. Thanks for the tip, though.
With more poking and prodding I really do think it’s just Safari being dicky. The text also looks noticeably darker than identically-coloured plain text right next to it. In Firefox, however, it’s just fine.
I only have one little complaint, regarding the (otherwise wonderful) admin interface:
My concern is that if others follow the way you’re leading, the WP admin-interface will soon become too cluttered with custom extension and additions, spread all over the place and mixed with the “regular” interface.
SO, why don’t you move your plugin config panel under …well, the “plugin” section? I think this way is also easier to find each plugin options.
Otherwise, WP could provide an automated way to highlight every plugins addition (e.g. with different text color) and give feedback about where it’s coming from (a lil’description, and so on….)
I hope I made myself clear.
I don’t know, Chad, it looks damned nice in Firefox for me. In my current version of IE it isn’t transparent, but I expected that.
Thanks!
Yeah, supposedly IE can actually display a transparent PNG file these days. Miracles happen. Sorry about the background diddling in Safari… I don’t know what to say about it, really.
I see where you’re coming from, Alessandro. Unfortunately there are no hooks in WordPress to allow installation of submenus under the Plugins menu. I’ll keep looking for better ways of integrating. Thanks for the suggestion.
Perhaps another good way to do it would be in the next WP version to actually have an area for plugin setting in the plugin area, kind of like how presentations is set up, having a list of plugins that have an admin interface and have the link for the options be there?
Very nice, thanks. Ooh, that’s a very nice auto-preview comment form. I need to find that…
[...] Image Headline Plugin
Very nice! I just finished installing this at my website and it looks lovely.
I do have what may be a stupid and obvious question…but is it possible to generate these headlines on nonposts – like static pages that aren’t using the_title? And if so, how would I call the plugin to do it’s job.
Also, I love your comment preview!
Not a stupid question at all and yes, you can easily do what you want. Simply make the following call where you want the image:
(Note: don’t put the backslashes… my code display hates me) If you have static text — meaning not in a variable — you can just do it like so:
Thanks for the kind words everyone.
<smack> yeah, I completely forgot about the IE transparent problems with PNG. But it doesn’t matter, because I still love it, and it’s a gorgeous effect. This is definitely one of my favorite plugins of all time now. Thanks!
Looks like a sweet plugin. However, I’m having trouble getting it to work. I can’t find the “the_title();” text anywhere. I’m using the 1.5 release. I’ve searched in the classic and default themes…I’m probably just doing something stupid.
Thanks for the help.
Anyway, I found where the “the_title();” text was hidden but now have the problem that when I click on “Headlines” under Options, nothing happens. Also, when I go to the post page the headline works fine but then I am unable to go back to the main page.
Anybody get non-titles to work, as described in comment #27? If so, could you post the code snippet? The call doesn’t seem to return anything. Thanks.
First off, thanks for the plugin. I appreciate the time and effort that you’ve put into it. It’s a great idea to liven up the page.
I’ve having a little trouble with it, however. I have successfully installed it, but my images aren’t showing correctly. With the default color settings still in place, the images aren’t showing as described – red letters with a soft gray background shadow. Here’s an example of what it’s showing as instead: http://www.digitalwilderness.net/wordpress/wp-content/image-headlines/361b6722ae6ffa1ede5a14c93a8af880.png
And this is without changing anything from the default, other than the “Image cache URL”
I’ve tried changing the colors, but the image usually shows as all white or all black…
I’ve made sure the appropriate directory is writable and checked to make sure images are being created as I’ve changed the options.
Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Great plugin, however I’m getting a bug from somewhere. My pages load fine, and the png’s are generated/shown, however when I mouse over the image when using IE (only at work for me – ff at home) I get a page error: Line: 98 Char: 5 Error: ‘nicetitle.length’ is null or not an object Code: 0 Any one of a fix?
FYI, a small conflict with the ‘view levels’ plugin which displays the image of a lock on post-titles with the viewlevel attribute on them. The image generated is for the text c=’/wp-images/padlock.gif’ border=’0′/><sup>1</sup>-image-… where ‘…’ is the post title. That’s followed by actual text of everything from ‘-image-’ onward, inclusive. It’s probably the viewlevels plugin that needs to be fixed but the published contact info for the author of it doesn’t seem to work any more.
Hi…newbie question…I don´t see any preview…on my admin panel…what is wrong…thanks
What other plugins do you have installed? The only thing that I can think of is that someone is redefining the “is_plugin_page()” function… I’ve seen at least one do that.
When you say your are unable to go back to the main page, what does that mean? It sounds like a navigation problem the way you state it which this plugin shouldn’t affect in the slightest. However, if you mean that the headlines work on the single-post page but not on the main page, you need to modify the “the_title()” call in all of the template files that you want the images displayed.
Note that in order to be able to do this you either need to call it from the template or use a plugin like RunPHP so that you can execute PHP code in your post or static page content.
Congratulations! You get “Funky Behavior Of The Day” award. (Note that I couldn’t load the file with the URL given, but this one worked just fine. To be honest, Chris, I haven’t a friggin’ clue what’s going on with that. What kind of host are you on? Any specific details of the hosting environment might help figure out what’s going on here.
Looks like a problem with your NiceTitles javascript implementation not handling things correctly. Do you have an URL where I can view this behavior?
I’ll see what I can do.
Double-check your cache url and cache folder settings and make certain that they both point to the same place in your installation.
Actually, I can’t even find a place to download the plugin, so it may be difficult to find a solution
. Can I email you at the address you gave so you can email me back the plugin?
i am using it on my site and it simply works great with the default font. however, when i tried to use roxanne, it showed some weird characters. i downloaded the font for windows PC. what do you think could be the problem?!
Upon loading that font — found here for those curious — it seems that the font only contains capital letters. Therefore, any lower-case letters in your title will be displayed incorrectly.
I tried to get non-post images to work, but didn’t have any luck either. I tried it in the template (index) and in other pages (that are also php). No luck. It works great on the_title, but nothing else.
If anybody has it working, I’d also love to know how.
thanks doublecheckign the cache path solved the “previe” problem. Now (another newbie question), how can I get this image headline on each and everyone of my posts?
Thanks for your time and help
If you mean on the individual entry pages, you’ll need to do the same change you made on your Main Template to the other templates (ie. the archives template, the single template, the page template, etc).
Let me double-check the method.
Sorry Adam, works as I described in comment #27. Remember not to include the backslashes.
Thanks for the reply Coldforged. I’ve now included the ‘-image-’ text in the post page…and it works on the post page. However, the main site does not work any longer. http://www.illiteratewithdrawal.com does not load when ‘-image-’ is included (remove it and the main page works). However, a direct link to a specific post does work: http://www.illiteratewithdrawal.com/2005/02/spam-karma/.
In regards to the Options not available for the plugin, I have these plugins activated: Header Image Generator, Spam Karma, and WP Plugin Manager.
Thanks for the help.
Hmm…I know this is going to seem like beating me over the head, but you can post your sample code with the full php call? I must be doing something wrong. Thanks.
Scott, could you disable Spam Karma temporarily and try again please?
Adam, that code you see in comment 27:
(minus the DAMNED backslashes) is the full PHP call. You can see it in action here, verbatim. Note that that is using the aforementioned RunPHP plugin.
I didn’t use echo. Could be the problem?
Spam Karma is now disabled and the same problem occurs.
Thanks for replying, CF. It’s nice to get an award, even if it’s the “Funky Behavior Of The Day” award.
I’m on pair.com. Here’s some environment info: OS: FreeBSD Server Software: Apache/1.3.29 PHP Version: 4.3.10 MySQL Version: 4.0.16
Any other info that would help?
Sorry about messing up that link, but you got it. Here is it again: Link
Yes, you can. Better yet, you can get it here: h*tp://jimbala.net/vl.txt .
Also perhaps of relevance if you install the thing: The instructions say to modify wp-blog-header.php but that doesn’t seem to be necessary with wp1.5 — there’s no call to filter_posts() any more. I actually didn’t do anything for this plugin after upgrading and it seems to work as expected.
Thanks, Jim. Could you try one thing and see how it affects the works? Edit the vl.php file (or whatever it’s called) and find the following lines:
And change them to read:
That seems to have fixed it. The 13 is an offset or something?
Excellent! That parameter is the priority that controls when the plugins will run. Essentially you have told the “view levels” plugin to run after the Image Headlines plugin.
Ah, most cool. Thanks for the fix.
For anyone that cares about using the viewlevel plugin, and because I already said no other changes were necessary but have since discovered that to be false: in 1.5 you DO have to change one file; it’s just wp-feed.php instead of wp-blog-header.php, and the change is meant to prevent vl’d post content from showing up in your RSS feeds. Anyway, on line 5 of wp-feed.php, right after ‘$doing_rss = 1;’, add ‘filter_posts($doing_rss);’ (without the apostrophes), then look at your RSS content and comment feeds to see if ‘Sorry, you must be logged in’ is anywhere to be found — it should NOT be — and obviously check for content that shouldn’t be there. Sorry for co-opting the thread a little bit, CF, but I didn’t want to let stand incorrect info that could cause someone’s private posts to be leaked.
No worries, this is as good a place as any since the view level plugin seems to have been orphaned. Thanks for clearing it up for others.
Just wanted to thank you again, I got the headlines working just fine on the non-posts just as easily as I installed the plugin. Thanks again!
I’m having a problem when I go to the Options/Headlines page, I get a message that my version of PHP doesn’t support ImageCreateTrueColor(). I run my own Win2k server with PHP 5.0.3. According to php.org, this function IS supported. Any idea how I can get this to work? Thanks!
You may simply not have the GD library enabled (it’s disabled by default in Windows installations). Check to see if the following line is in your php.ini file. If not, put it in and restart the PHP extension.
extension=php_gd2.dllWorking great for me!
Thanks ! Enabling php_gd2.dll was the needed fix. Works great now!
Functionally, this is working great. However, under Options/Headlines, I have noticed that whenever I click the Update Options button, the Image Cache Folder entry accumulates more backslashes. It appears to be doubling the number of backslashes between each directory name in my path entry. The entries that use forward slashes don’t seem to be affected by this.
Functionally, the plugin is working, however, every time I click the Update Options button on the Headlines page, the entry for the Image Cache Folder doubles the number of backslashes between each directory name. Entries with forward slashes are not affected.
I’m curious, if I want the images to display with all caps, could I add an “strtoupper” in the plugin code? Not sure where. Is there an easier way? I don’t want to change the actual titles.
Ah, Windows pathnames… something I didn’t take into account. I’ll make an update in the coming days. Until then, don’t do that
.
Absolutely! Look for the line that looks like this:
return ImageHeadline_imagine( $text );and change it like so:
return ImageHeadline_imagine( strtoupper( $text ) );I just installed this plugin; works great! Love it. Thanks!
Great plugin…really nice. Using it at Original Copy
working great with your advice…by the way nice place. And this comment place great too.
I followed every step in order to get this plugin working, but it seems that: a- I am a dork b- Even I followed the steps every time I click on Options > Headlines I can’t see no Preview at all c- The only way to get into the configuration page is by deleting the .ttf fonts of the directory, and if I upload the default ttf, once again I cannot see the preview in the headline configuraton page. d- If I activate the plug-in, and get the code the_title (‘-imäge-’); inside my main template (ä = a), when it loads my blog i get the -imäge- right beside my title with no image displaying. I am really interested in getting this solved, so please, give me a hand or lend me a rope, but please, help me!!! regards from argentina
CF, any suggestions? Right now I’d just like to be able to get to its option’s page. Thanks.
I’m having issues with plugin, when activated it brings the site down with this following error:
ERROR The requested URL could not be retrieved While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.sbhatta.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=image-headlines.php
The following error was encountered:
URL can be anything, it can even the index page if I add tags to the index page.
The only way I’m able to see the Plugin config page is by removing the “images-headlines” folder.
I think I have GD library at my server because blogtimes plugin uses GD which is working fine and cache folders are write enabled too. Other than this I’m not able to think of anything else which I should check.
Thanks in advance.
Scott, admittedly you have me a bit stumped. Let me ask you this: do all of the individual entry pages that would appear on the front page work correctly? One thing you might try is enabling it on the individual entry pages and visiting every individual page that would appear on the front page — from “North Korea May Have Miscalculated China” to “Investing and PayTrading” — so that all of those images are calculated and cached. That way the front page won’t have to work to create them. That doesn’t help for the options page, I know, but one thing at a time
.
Suman and muchacho loco,
I’m starting to see a familiar refrain. Let me create a version that performs a different check for GD version. Unfortunately the check that I currently do cannot adequately predict whether you have the right version to support the functions I use. It’s sounding like both of you have the incorrect version.
I had very little trouble in installing this plugin, with two small exceptions.
When the images are displayed they show a border around them about 3PX wide. I may have missed it, but have not found anything in the style sheet that creates them. Any suggestions?
Secondly, so far I have not been able to install a font other than Warp and have the plugin recognize them.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Cranial Cavity
Try adding the following rule to your CSS under the ‘.title a’ declaration.
Do you have an example of a font that doesn’t work that’s downloadable?
After a little bit of a struggle due to the famous RTFM bug I was able to install and run this great plugin. Although my website is in Dutch you still can see the effect it has on the titles form each post. I’m running the ShaedGrey template on WordPress 1.5 and have chosen the Georgia font size 14 with color #333066. I hope it looks well with this theme any comment appreciated.
Looks nice, Blips, thanks for letting us know.
CF, the problem seems to have to do with the length of my titles. When the title was “Investing and PayTrading,” it didn’t work but it worked when I shortened it to just “Investing.”
As you can now see, my main site works when I make all the titles of a shorter length. However, the Options still don’t work.
I am using it on Some Great Reward dot com but I am getting boxes around the image and haven’t been able to integrate it with the template. I have been using the titles before just with a separate PHP file, I thought using your plugin would be better if I can work out the box and spacing issues.
Scott, would you mind creating a file called “memory.php” temporarily in your blog root and put the following text in it:
(And as usual, don’t replicate the backslashes… it’s my damned code display script.) And navigate to the script (e.g. http://www.illiteratewithdrawal.com/memory.php). Then post the results, if you don’t mind.
See comment #73… it appears to be a common problem with that template, for whatever reason.
The results: Limit:8M Usage:15456
I have addressed the box and I shrank the text size so I would not have any two line titles. Is there any way to make adjustements to move the posting down when the title requires two lines?
Suman and muchacho loco, there’s a new version available that has some better detection of features as well as a few fall-back options. See if they help you out.
Scott, you can try this version but somehow I don’t think it will do much for you. I’m still rather stumped about your problem.
Yes. You are currently defining your .title style to be 18px high, regardless of content. Remove that rule from .title and you’ll no longer have problems with multiple lines not being displayed appropriately. Note that now your titles are further away from the next text. You can correct this in various ways… remove the “line-height” setting of your h3 declaration and replace it with a “margin-bottom: 5px;”. That’s pretty close.
I’m seeing the same sort of memory use exceeded error as Scott probably is:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 16 bytes) in /home/arioch/public_html/wp-content/plugins/image-headlines.php on line 358
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 10 bytes) in /home/arioch/public_html/wp-settings.php on line 140
[...] « A New Project Image Titles for 1.5 New WP Image Titles plugin for version 1.5 is available. [...]
Thanks CF the CSS change eliminated the box around the title images.
The unrecognized fonts? Oops, Somehow in the fog of working at 1am it got loaded in the wrong directory!
Thanks every thing seems to be working. Now about the spell checker, but that’s a project for another day.
You were right CF, I see no difference with the new version uploaded.
CF, I really appreciate the tireless effort you have put behind this plugin but some how its not working to my favour. I tried the new version with better GD checks little while ago with no luck, I’m having same issues.
A lot easier to set up than I thought it would be! I’m glad it’s possible to chase the case of the fonts. Visit benlewis.ca
Division by 0 errors:
Warning: Division by zero in /home/mrhappyg/public_html/mt/wp-content/plugins/image-headlines.php on line 382
Warning: Division by zero in /home/mrhappyg/public_html/mt/wp-content/plugins/image-headlines.php on line 383
I’m slowly going crazy. Please help
Should probably add, this started after I set the shadow offsets to 0.
Which apparently, wasn’t a smart thing to do.
MrhappyGoLucky: I’d say “don’t do that” but that wouldn’t help at this point
. Instead I’ll say “download the new version 2.3″. And it wasn’t so much the shadow offsets as the shadow spread that created the problem.
Suman, don’t give up hope… if things go well I should have another version out at some point to help with your problem. I may contact you personally if things don’t go right, however
.
Dean, the next version (2.4) will fix your slashes problem… I forgot to get it in this version. Once I figure out what’s going on with Suman and Scott I’ll release that version.
Hey CF a couple questions regarding this plugin.
Currently it is working fine and replaces the title for each of my entires. (although still searching for the correct spot for the code on comment pages) Is it possible to also replace the titles in my sidebar in the same but smaller size font?
Secondly, on occasion I use dropcaps on some posts. They are manually inserted using a span tag around the first letter. Is it possible to have the dropcaps replaced with font image?
Thanks.
Marc, as of right now it is not possible to do either of the things you are requesting (though you could have it do dropcaps by explicitly calling the imageheadlines function in your post using the RunPHP plugin as long as you didn’t mind the dropcap being the same parameters as the titles). However, I’ll make it a feature request for a future version and then you’ll be good to go.
Thanks for the idea!
Thanks, CF. I’ll be sure to get the new version when available. BTW, I noticed the same backslash problem with your spell checker.
Great job on these plug-ins! They are totally cool!
[...] e. The support that he provided was top-notch. This is the page with the comments for the Image Headline Plugin Download and Setup Instructions [...]
That’s very nice of you CF.
Shortly after posting over here I tried what Scott did, I turned off the “soft-shadow feature” and Lo!! plugin now works! Turning classic shadows ON doesn’t break anything, so it seems like there is some Voodoo in the new soft-shadows code that’s creating all this havoc, none-the-less great stuff CF.
That’s great news, Suman, and your headlines look great! As I’ve told Scott, I have ideas on reducing the memory footprint of the plugin while it’s calculating the soft-shadows — as you found out, even on moderately sized images it was allocating over 9M of memory for temporary storage — so I feel hopeful that I can get it down to a point where you guys whose hosting providers do set that memory limit will be able to fit all but the largest images.
Stay tuned.
Yes, I see now too.
After switching to Classic, the plugin is working fine here.
Guys, I’ve come up with a solution for those of you with hosting providers that set memory limits. I’ll be releasing a new version soon with this change as well as a few more things that will of interest to some.
Psst… hey guys, look over here.
My preview image does not show up under the headline option. I am a complete newbie to this and I don’t understand anything about “tarballs” or where to put them or execute them after downloading them. Can you please help?
Cassandra, what does show up? How did you install the plugin… did you use the WordPress Plugin Manager? If so, you don’t need to know about tarballs as it will handle (almost) everything for you.
To install manually, download that tarball you mentioned and upload it to your WordPress installation’s ‘wp-content’ directory. Once it’s there, open a shell to your host, change directory to the aforementioned wp-content directory and perform the command I mentioned in the install instructions:
tar xvzf image-headlines.tar.gzThen go to your plugins page in the WordPress administration pages and activate the plugin. Then you should be able to go to the main Options page and see a submenu called “Headlines.” Clicking on that will bring you to the options page for the headlines. From there it’s a matter of experimenting with settings to get the look you desire.
[...] royectoisla.com/planetawp/?p=933″> » Image Headline Plugin coldforged Image Headline Plugin gives you re [...]
This is an example of what i am getting when running the plugin. Everything works fine but the text gets cut off near the bottom of the picture. I wouldn’t mind if mij pictures were a teetsy bigger but i don’t know what to change in the plugin code.
Could you help me please ?
this is what happens with the images that are made for me .. they seem cut off at the bottom. Any help with this ?
kib, can you try this and see if it helps?
In version 2.2/3 I could change the case of the font the way you mentioned in comment 65, however with version 2.4 out this no longer works. What method should I use now in order to make my headlines all uppercase?
Yeah, the name of the function changed… one minor adjustment is all you need:
ColdForged – any chance you will be making some enhancements to parse and handle html tags within a post title?
ex: http://limeshurbet.com/?p=436
Doubtful, Robert, mostly because of complexity. The PHP library that does the font rendering has no way of rendering an italics (or bold for that matter) version of a font, so it would necessitate being able to specify individual font files for oblique and bold fonts. Then would be the actual HTML parsing and additionally complex box calculations for arbitrary regions of different sized text (italics and bold typically draws wider) which would mean that the line splitting stuff would also get more complex, etc, etc.
.
That said, the best I can do short-term to make your titles more appealing would be to strip the HTML tags out of it before rendering. Not an ideal solution for certain, but less ugly anyway. If you’d like to do that, I can tell you what to add to the plugin… it’s a simple, one-line change much like the uppercase hack seen in comment #113.
Such a great and easy to use plugin, but I can’t change the color of the font from it’s default peach. I entered a new value – “#EF4A9E” – into the field “font color,” but both the preview and title on my templates show up as peach. I checked the databse and the new value shows up in the table even though it’s not displayed. Any ideas?
ColdForged – Please do email the code change to me. I love the plugin and will happily give up html in my titles for it!
ColdForged, Im recieving this error when I try to configure the plugin. I had to do this manual install. The Plugin Manager has never worked right for me. Here is what I get.
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: get_plugin_page_hook() in c:\hosting*\member\7milesdown*\admin.php on line 44
The headline folder was placed in the wp-content area, while the plugin was placed in the plugin folder (obviously). When I activiated it, everything went fine until I tried to configure it. Please let me know if you can help. I really would like this on my site. your plugin rocks!
I’ll stick it here as your subscribed, just in case someone else wants it. I’ll be including this in the next version as I think it’s the “Responsible Thing To Do” anyway… but I don’t think it’s quite enough of a change to warrant a new release. People typically don’t like a lot of flux in their plugins
. Here’s the change:
from this:
to this:
Unfortunately that sounds more like a WP installation problem than a problem caused by the plugin. The function that it’s failing on should be in a file called “admin-functions.php” in that same directory. Make sure that that file is there and is readable by the webserver and if it is verify that the needed function is in that file. If not, I’d recommend a reinstall of the WP files.
Great – Thanks!
thanks. I’ll look into that.
Oso, unfortunately you’re the second person to receive this error and I have no clue what is causing it. Let me investigate some. Could I contact you via the email address you provided to test some things if I can come up with a possible solution? I’ve worked personally with several people you see here if you have reservations.
I looked into that. It was my hack I used in the wp-fucntions for that stupid enable referrer thing. I fixed it though, and its running great. Thanks for the awesome plugin.!
Great news, Trench, glad you got it worked out.
Oso, I’ve since discovered that this is a known bug in certain versions of GD or PHP. Unfortunately a solution is not as easily found… some people say “upgrade to a newer version of PHP” which is often not easy. Others say that the problem is using TrueColor, others say the problem is not using TrueColor. Some say buggy FreeType support, etc, etc.
I have one thing for you to try… modify the plugin and look for the line that says:
Change that '2' to '4'. You won't be able to use soft-shadows, unfortunately, but hopefully it will give you something that works. And, if it does work, I'll try to create a version that supports soft-shadows but uses non-TrueColor images so that you guys aren't screwed.
Thanks.
Hi. This is a great plugin. Anyway, I was trying to configure the settings for the first time after installing it, when i encountered this error:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: imagettfbbox() in /home/bikoy/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/image-headlines.php on line 790
Have I done something wrong?
Unfortunately, no, you haven’t done anything wrong. However, your webhost arguably has
. Essentially your webhost has a version of PHP or GD that doesn’t support the TrueType font rendering routines. Your only recurse is to file a support ticket with them to ask that they install a version that does support them.
Thanks for letting me know. I’ve tried to add as much checking as possible to make certain that you are alerted in a friendly way when prerequisites aren’t met and that’s one that slipped through. Not much solace, I know, but hopefully it’ll help someone in a future version.
First of all, thank you so much for all the support you’re giving with this plugin. I changed the code like you said and now it’s working like a charm. If you do find a work around with the soft-shadows, that would be great, but regardless, I’m going to ask Dreamhost to upgrade GD. Thanks again!
Awesome news, oso, I’m glad that got you at least functioning part of the way. Now that I know that that works for you I have a bit more incentive to approach that alternate method of doing things for you poor souls with bad versions of GD/PHP/whatever it is
.
Thanks for the information about the success.
So, after some futzing around with my host, they managed to get gd/freetype and php playing nice and I have the Headline Images up and working. And I must say it looks good. http://delusionsofgrandeur.org.
Also, for some awesome fonts, visit blambot. http://blambot.com
Hacks and TV and Stuff
So I’ve decided, I’m going to have to come up with a page that lists the hacks I have installed on this damned thing for the general public. Maybe there’s a plugin for that. Who knows. I installed the image headline plugin from ColdForge and I work…
Congrats, they look great. Glad your webhost went the distance for you. And I have to agree about Blambot… of course, that’s where my headline font comes from as well. Simply gorgeous fonts.
[...] /a> Announcing the Paged Comment Editing plugin. No, doesn’t sound as fancy as the Image Headline plugin or even the Spell Checker plugin [...]
Well I have played with the setup the last 20 minutes and read through all the pages you have here, im not sure what im doing wrong… I uploaded the files via a ftp client. wp-content/image-headlines is chmod of 777 i uploaded a font (its .ttf) to the image headlines folder. and I uploaded the plugin file into the plugin folder. The config shows up, but it produces a broken image instead of producing a nice looking picture. is it that im not using wp plugin manager?
Rob, check to make sure that the folder you specified for your image cache matches the URL to that same folder.
yup you were right. it was the image cache url. It didnt have the folder where the actual wp install was. I just looked at the properties of the broken picture and it was the home address then the wp-content folder.
I know it was my fualt, but maybe you could add a trouble shooting section and include this one. All the person has to do is right click the (broken) image, and make sure that its the full proper address. thanks again.
Hi. Thanks for the response. What version should I ask them to upgrade their GD or PHP to?
Good news, rob!
Victor, I wish I had a solid answer for you! I believe that PHP version 4.3.10 with a recent, 2.0.something release of GD (I have 2.0.28) — with TrueType or FreeType support compiled in and enabled — should suffice, but I am no expert. Good luck!
Thanks, it’s great and easy. The only problem i had is that i needed to use absolute urls to the imagefiles…
Hi, I’m also having problems with the installation but I’m pretty sure they have to do with my PHP build. The “Headlines” page doesn’t work properly when the TTF file is where it should be.
I already have –with-gd –with-xml –with-ttf –enable-gd-native-ttf –enable-exif in my config.nice. I’m thinking freetype is next. It’s late now, so it’ll have to wait for tomorrow. Would anybody happen to know what the absolute minimum requirements are for this plugin?
Well, anyway, it’s a nice plugin even if I haven’t been able to use it yet. It’s just a matter of time.
Ref comments 35, 37, and 42. I have installed the plugin in my second blog and have the same problem, the preview isn’t displayed.
I verified the Image cache folder and the image cache URI are the same. Any other sugestions why this is occuring?
Apparently, I have the same problem as muchacho loco. If image-headlines contains any ttf files, there is no way for me to get on the image-headlines.php page: Nothing happens when I click on “Headlines” under “Options” or on “Headline Images Configuration” on the “Plugins” page. I am using php 4.3.10 with the default GD and with freetype 1.3.1. The GD works, I know this cause I’m also using the Blog-Times plugin and that doesn’t have any problems. Anybody any ideas?
Hello – if you view my site http://sekhu.net/wp you will note that the plugin doesn’t seem to be working as it should? I noticed that even the preview within the admin panel failed to show, so then I guess it’s no surprise that the image on titles will not show.
Reading many of the comments, I did check the path and it seems to be accurate. Right clicking the image gives a 404 but will cache the image on the server (I provided 777 rights, what should it be?). I just can’t seem to get them to display for whatever reason.
Any ideas on this, I would like to get to working as it seems quite a nifty little graphical effect.
Thanks in advance
PS: It installed absolutely fine, I can view the options but the effects don’t seem to be showing. Not even in the admin panel, as stated.
I am having the exact same problem as Victor but it seem I am meeting all of your prerequisites. You can see here:
http://dc2-web23.assortedinternet.com/phpinfo.php
Hi
I managed to resolve part of the problem and it was a path issue, as the default didn’t cater for the subfolder.
In nay case I noticed it fails to add a style/image to the fifth post. Only the first four posts receive any formatting.
Any ideas?
Michalis, is this with the latest version of the plugin, version 2.4?
Tek, the GD portion is not reporting a FreeType support enabled. You’ll need to have your host recompile PHP with the ‘–with-freetype-dir=/usr/lib’ or something similar as far as I can tell.
sekhu, I see all posts replaced with images. Where is an example of the problem?
ColdForged, yes, I am using version 2.4. Strange, isn’t it?
Nice plugin. Clean, easy, and makes awesome looking titles!
I’m using it with WP1.5, Vrinda ttf, and the WP1.5 default Kubrick theme (just tweaked colors). Still figuring out how I want the geometry changed on Kubrick.
Anyway, good stuff, thank you.
this did the trick to my problem!! wonderful! thanks for this great script!
http://www.mattmartz.com
great plugin, thanks a lot
I also like the format of your site, and this is the first one where i’ve seen the live comment preview thing below… very cool
One more post from me… I also used it on http://TAoDS.mattmartz.com (a short story type deal that I write) Site looks exactly the same…
it may just be the font i’m using (warp1) but it doesn’t seem to like elipses (…)
Yeah, warp1 doesn’t contain a glyph for true ellipses, so you have to fool it like you did on your site. My font — Baddaboom for those interested — doesn’t either
.
Michalis, I see the images work now. Congrats! What did you have to do to get them working? Also, I see the same problem that oso has reported in the other thread (lines with descenders on the second line getting cut off) on your site. I’m currently working on a solution to that.
I used the one click install to install your plugin. I uploaded the font file as required and configured the settings.
I change the_title() to the_title(‘-image-’) as specified (copy-pasted) but it just won’t display the image on my site
I can see all the images created in the folder. as expected. But just won’t display on the blog
The blog is at http://www.ajaydsouza.com/
Image Headline seems to break permalinks: I get links like “http://www.dalahus.com/page/2/%3C?php%20the_permalink()%20?%3E” Is there hack in index.php for this?
Ajay, you changed the wrong
. You changed the one in the “title” attribute of your permalink. Switch that back the way it was and change the very next
the_title()callthe_title()call and you should be good to go. Note that it should literally be about 3 characters ahead of where you tried to make the change.That’s not the plugin, Steve. Looks like somehow your template’s PHP invocations got converted to HTML entities. Go to your theme editor under Presentation, open the Main Template and scroll down to where that code is in the template. Change those
<and>things back to real < and > characters.Update to my above comment. I did a complete find and replace in my theme. There were way too many files to update and now it works properly. Sorry for the double comment.
Thanks for the plugin. It is really really cool
I just need to figure out how to set teh background as transparent
Erm… read my response again, Ajay. You don’t want to replace every single
the_title()call like that. You only want the to modify the single one between the<a href=""> THIS ONE </a>tags otherwise you’ll get some seriously goofy stuff… like you’re currently seeing.Curious, my index has only the one instance of
the_title(). I don’t recall removing a second one.Heh I replied to the wrong post…(you’re fast with the replies!) Anyway fixed, thanks. I don’t know how those brackets got borked.
Steve, note that your “storytitle” h3 tags are still diddled. Change the ones around the
the_ID();call back to real < and > characters too. Same thing for your single post template.Thanks again. Maybe you can help with something; for some reason the baseline of my text is getting clipped if it doesn’t have descenders. I tried a number of fonts, and it’s the same problem. I futzed around with my css, but nothing seems to work. Ideas?
* ColdForged points to comment #153 *
Ah, a “known bug”. This is on my first and only lines though, not second. See my site. I guess for now the solution is to use all caps eh?
oops all-caps doesn’t work..so I guess one has to have descending characters.
True, that is a difference. I’ll take it into account in any fix I try to provide. Thanks for the additional information.
OK– me again
Looks like you can also “cheat” by adding a drop shadow.
A few of things I’d like in a future version:
1) Letter spacing
2) sRGB tagged images; In Safari, the colors are thrown off (see http://googlefaughnan.blogspot.com/2005/02/colorsync-support-with-safari.html)
3) Font size by pixels. I never use point size in setting graphical fonts, it’s not accurate enough
4) Cache clearing of unused images — that folder is filling up FAST (although I suppose that’s just due to all my futzing…)
Yes, adding a shadow is a workaround that’s been proven effective, I forgot it wasn’t mentioned on this page.
Of all of your requests, #4 is about the only one I can do anything about, and really you’re the best determination of when that cache clearing should happen. I could clear out the cache for any change to settings, but sometimes people try one thing then change back to their old style which would necessitate creating all of them again. I don’t know which is the greater evil, really.
1) too bad 2) No biggie, I have no idea what GD can and can’t do. 3) See #2. I do it automatically in Photoshop all the time, so assumed this was a basic “thing”.
I discovered another problem (hinted in an above comment): The parser doesn’t like quotes, ellipses (typing in three periods, not just the ellipsis character) and probably some others; for example,
"foo..."results in the sample"foo...", and justfooin the actual .png file.Gah! in my sample above, backslashes were stripped out of the code: It should read:
(backslash)"foo...(backslash)"Do you mean in the preview text box on the plugin page?
Yup. Weird that it would look one way in the preview and different in the final image (both being wrong not withstanding). Also, the preview box itself is replaced with just a backslash, not the original text.
The handling of the preview box I can fix, I’ve seen it here as well. Thanks for the heads up.
Now when you say “sample” you mean the preview image had backslashes in it? And when you say “final image” do you mean on a real “production” page and that a glyph didn’t show up?
One thing to bear in mind is that the preview text will not automatically turn three periods into an ellipsis character like WordPress will in other circumstances. So, the fact that you get something that might look like an ellipsis glyph to show up in the preview image doesn’t say too much. If your font file doesn’t contain a glyph for the ellipsis character, it won’t appear on your production pages when you have three periods in the title because WP will convert them to an ellipsis before the plugin gets a chance to render it. The text rendering routines support any ASCII character and will faithfully sling them down the rendering pipeline and draw whatever is in your font file for that glyph, whether it’s blank or not.
1) yes. 2) I checked, however; my font does contain the ellipsis glyph. Anyway, why are quotes being dropped? I had suspected WP was converting them to curly-quotes, but forced straight hashes aren’t rendering either.
This has to do with your image headlines plugin. Can you please help me? I’ll even let you log into my server.
=(
Okay, now I have no errors but I have no headlines showing up at all… and yes, I did change the_title in my index. =(
My website is
http://www.tekwh0re.net
MsTek, what does your preview show on the Headlines options page?
I tried it out on my test site and it works quite well, however, I was wondering how come .PFB font files are supported by this one, unlike the older version. Can I use the older version (1.6) that is compatible with WP1.2.1 with WP 1.5?
Frankly I know nothing about PFB files — or didn’t before I looked into them to try to answer your question — and as far as I can tell neither version of the plugin supports PFB files.
As far as I know it should work fine, but I don’t have the older version around any more to test.
It shows nothing at all. Nada. However if I change the text size, it adjusts accordingly.
PS. I am Tek but for some reason it won’t let me comment under that name on here anymore. =(
If it shows nothing at all, what adjusts accordingly?
How do you mean? What happens if you try to comment with “Tek”?
Tells me comments have been closed.
The SIZE of the box adjusts accordingly but there is no text in that box. If there WERE it would be big like that but there isn’t so its just a big white space.
Odd.. I can post a comment as your Tek signature with no problem. In fact, using the tekwh0re mail and URL it doesn’t even go to moderation. Mind trying again?
What colors do you have specified for your font and background? Do you have transparent backgrounds on?
Font: #cc0000 bg: #333
Transparent is on.
If I turn it off, then I do get a color for the background but no text.
I am having major problems getting this plug-in to work. Looking through the threads I think I have the same problem as Scott in post #30. I am using WP 1.5, and installed using the one-click installation (this in its self was a nightmare as I had to ask my host to put your IP address into their firewall to be able to download, as I do for any one-click installation I want!).
When I activiated the plug-in I noticed there was no preview when I went to the headlines tab, and no .ttf files were found. After a little investigation I found the .ttf file had not installed in the Images-headlines folder. When I tried to FTP the file it kept failing, so I tried to change the permissions of the folder, but was unable to. In desparation I created a new folder and moved the relevant .ttf files there – and renamed the old folder as I hadn’t the permissions to delete the contents. This seemed to work, as in the ‘Headline Image Options’ had recognised the font (although there was still no preview) and I updated my design requirements.
I then found where I needed to insert the ‘-image-’, and made those changes and uploaded the file to the server. However when I viewed my blog, it stopped rendering the page when it got to where the first title should be. Hence I deleted the ‘-image-’ and uploaded again.
Next I went back to ‘Headline Image Options’ in Options to see if I where I had gone wrong. However the only thing it displays is “Preview This is a preview of your current settings. Save your settings to update the preview. ” and nothing else.
Now I am stumped. Maybe I should change the permissions on the Images-headlines folder? But at the moment I am at work. I have a feeling my problem is with my host (They do not allow me mod_rewrite without upgrading my account with them), but maybe I am doing something silly.
Any ideas?
Sorry for your woes, Paul. Are there any error files created anywhere in your installation, or do errors appear in the page source by any chance?
I wish there were errors, then at least I would have some reference on how to proceed. When I put the ‘-image-’ part in the index.php of the default folder, the page stops rendering where the first post title should be. I view the page source and its the same, the last thing it shows is title=”name of post”>.
In WP-admin – Headline Image Options – it just shows: Preview This is a preview of your current settings. Save your settings to update the preview.
I just remembered – I was going to chane the file permissions to the Images-headlines folder. Just changed it to 755 and now get the error message that the Images-headlines is not writable. Any ideas on how to make it writable?
Just tried to get into Headlines from the admin panel and I now see:
FATAL: The directory you specified to cache the image files is not writeable from the Apache task. Either select a different directory or make the directory you specified writable by the Apache task (chmod 755 the directory).
So seem to be moving in the right direction…
Note, Paul, that it sounds like for your server you should be chmoding it to 777. Yes, that means anyone could write into it, but luckily there’s nothing of value aside from the fonts.
When I chmod it to 777 it goes back to the symptoms in para 1 #187.
I’m losing more hair…
Would you like a login to see what I am seeing?
That would be very helpful, Tek. I’ll send you an email.
Paul, it certainly seems as if something in your hosting environment hates the plugin. Unfortunately it’s very hard to tell what is happening from this end. Obviously something about the creation of the image is failing in some way, but narrowing it down is next to impossible.
Yes, thats the conclusion I came up with. Now to change my host…
thanks for the advice.
If/When you find one and need help getting things squared away don’t hesitate to ask.
Hi,
How would you remove the link border for the image that is displayed? Frr example, I am using the code in my navigation, what I would like to do is display it as is, but without the border for the link – I’m not sure why it displays
CF..The headlines part is going solid…but the override feature is giving me this error:
Error: The server is missing the specified font.ArchiveThis is the code that I’m using to generate the image from the TTF:Any suggestions?
Opps…here is the code:
ImageHeadline_render( 'Archives','font_file=http://www.adamstac.com/strayhorn/wp-content/image-headlines/OceanSansMTBook.ttf&font_size=18' );Forgot to subscribe…
Ok, so I solved the issue, but thought that I’d mention something:
It was solved by putting the font file in the root, therefore removing all forward slashes that denote a new directory to the path of the file. I think this part of the plug in has issues with forward slashes, because I triple checked for typos and even copy & pasted the path to be sure that it I didn’t make the same mistake that MtDewVirus made in Comment 11.
But all is solved as of now, and I’ll just keep the font stowed away in the root…that’s cool with me!
Re-Launch of “The Life of Me.” is set for my B-Day | March 17th, 2005 but may come sooner. I told you that I’d be making use of this plug in didn’t I CF?! I love it…I can’t thank you enough for being the MadCoder that you are!
Too damn cool of you to hook the WP community up like this!
Awesome news, Adam! By the way, the problem with the
. It’s not obvious in the directions, I realize, and they’ve since been updated.
font_filefield that you had was that it was meant to be the full file system path to the font file, not an URLCan’t wait to see the new site and the interesting things you’ve done with the plugin! And you’re very welcome
Any idea with my quotes/ellipsis problem? No matter what font I use, they’re being dropped. To refresh, I’m using standard fonts, such as Myriad, which contain these characters.
I’m sure you’re using standard fonts, and I’m sure you feel that they are there. But, unfortunately, those glyphs simply aren’t provided or they’re provided in such a way that the FreeType library compiled into GD compiled into PHP can’t use them. If I use Myriad Pro I get big red squares with Xs through them where those glyphs would be:
On the exact same text, but just changing the font to use the freely available District Thin, I get this:
Frankly, there’s nothing more I can do aside from recommend you find a font that you like that draws the text the way you want it using this library. I really have no recourse here, the library just draws the glyphs that correspond to the text given to it. Sorry.
Your post doesn’t show any examples. Anyway, it’s just weird. Isn’t the point of ASCII that character mappings are consistent? I poked through the mappings of Warp1 and some other random fonts, and they’re of course identical (save for the fact that Warp1 isn’t a complete font). Could there be any link to the fonts not being precisely “.ttf” but OTF or FFL? They work fine otherwise.
I guess this should be chalked up as a bug in GD. Oh well.
Thanks for that update CF, I tried the system path but I didn’t have the home2/user/ part in there…so that must have been the culprit. I’ll test it out later tonight and get back to if I have issues.
To sum up my feelings on this plug in:
“It has allowed me to add a finishing touch that, in my eyes, has completed my new design…without Image-Headlines the design wouldn’t be as good as it could have been.”
I am really happy with this if you can’t tell!!
hi cf, i crossposted this in the wp-support forums::
so, my image headlines plugin works great. my headlines have been transformed into a font that i uploaded.
the problem is, the admin/preview screen has disappeared. well, not entirely, but everything from “this is a preview of your settings…” is gone.
what could be causing this and how can i fix it?
(i also read through the comments here and thought it might be the cache settings – but the images ARE showing up on index.php. that and it’s the rest of the page that’s missing on the admin screen and not just the preview… but i can’t verify what exactly the cache settings are because of the blank page. any ideas?)
Is it possible your preview text is too long? Go to the Plugin Editor (or edit the plugin file in your shell if you have access… your choice). Find the line that says this (all on one line, ignore my line breaks):
and change it to this:
If that works, change your preview text to something shorter and change the plugin back to the old code and see if that works.
That’s currently the only thing I can think of.
Works like a dream -thanks! Can I use this with single_cat_title?
I’m heartened to hear you say that, Adam, and I greatly look forward to seeing what you’ve done with it!
CF, it’s been a while. I’ve made everything work, however one last thing I am curious about (and something that I find difficult weeding through 200+ comments for) is if the plugin can be implemented multiple times depending on the theme used. I apologize if this has been asked and answered already.
OK CF…so the sites up and running just fine, but I just went to clear out the image-headlines folder to clear out any unused images and it says that I don’t have rights to delete the files, access denied. I have but one admin login to my web server, so…
I installed with the “Plug-in Manager” one-click style…any thoughts? Oh, and I can’t delete the folder either…I have rights to I checked the CHMOD as well.
I also emailed you a question about formatting other “dynamic” PHP code into images, did you get that?
Hasn’t been asked yet, good question. The short answer is “no.” The slightly longer answer is “yes, with some work.” What you’d do is set up your headline images settings for one of your themes and modify that theme’s
the_title()calls to have the prefix. For the rest of your themes, instead of the prefix modification, you’d need to use the format overrides functionality and call theImageHeadlines_render()function explicitly for the titles, specifying the format you wanted for each of them explicitly. See here for more information on how to accomplish that.It hates you
. But seriously, perform a
chmod 0777 *inside that folder and then try to delete. You should have more success that way.Hmm…I tried that and I get:
site chmod 777 /www/wp-content/images/image-headlines/006155eddce02fdfbf06cf4f494c1ed0.png 550 Could not change perms on /www/wp-content/images/image-headlines/006155eddce02fdfbf06cf4f494c1ed0.png: Bad file descriptorMaybe it’s a bug in the one-click install of Plug-In Manager. Not sure what to do about this.
ok.. first of all, this is a pretty cool comment page.
I can’t get my font to install at all. Never mind trying to do it manually, all I get told is that it’s not allowed. I can’t even change the permission on the folder I need to put it in. I did the one-click install and it ignored the font. I tried uoloading my own fonts (I really wanted to use Papyrus) and it won’t let me. Any ideas? I really would like to use this feature as it is hella cool!
Please help!
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: imagettfbbox() in /var/www/htdocs/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/image-headlines.php on line 793
Wondering if anyone else got this error message and was able to fix it?
The font ignoring is a known problem and is in the readme, but it seems like the One-Click install does have a problem with permissions when plugins run under the UID of the web server. Between yours and Adam’s problems with permissions, I think I’m going to have to do something with correcting permissions of created files in those cases.
In the meantime, you can use the WordPress upload function to upload additional fonts, too. You first need to allow TTF files under the Options -> Miscellaneous menu, then use the Upload function to upload a new font. In other words, fonts in the
image-headlinesfolder or in the upload folder are available to the plugin.Scroll up and read comments 126 and 127.
Sweet now I know the error is being caused by my php or gd not being up to version. What is gd anyway? Is there a certain version I’m looking for on both of these or do I just need to recompile them with different optiong?
GD is the graphics library that PHP uses to perform all graphics operations. You can download the latest version, 2.0.33 from there. I run 2.0.28 so the new one should work dandy. You’ll also want to have the latest version of FreeType, as that’s the library that GD uses to render text.
Once you have those libraries installed, you’ll need some configuration options to get PHP to recognize them. Here’s my entire configuration on my server, with the relevant ones in
bold.'./configure' '--prefix=/usr' '--with-xml' '--enable-bcmath' '--enable-calendar' '--with-curl' '--enable-ftp' '--with-gd' '--with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local' '--with-png-dir=/usr' '--with-xpm-dir=/usr/X11R6' '--with-gettext' '--with-imap' '--with-imap-ssl' '--with-kerberos' '--with-mcrypt' '--enable-magic-quotes' '--with-mysql' '--enable-discard-path' '--with-pear' '--enable-sockets' '--enable-track-vars' '--with-ttf' '--with-freetype-dir=/usr' '--enable-gd-native-ttf' '--enable-versioning' '--with-zlib'Oddly enough, although I have allowed ttf files to be uploaded, I can’t seem to get that to work either. Every time I try it just opens up the font file and shows me the text – you know instead of showing up in the Upload field. So far I have tried this from my home computer and now here at work. Maybe it’s a Windows thing and XP doesn’t let you upload files?
OH, well thanks anyhow!
It is indeed a Windows thing… but there’s an easy way around it. Go here and scroll down to “Using other fonts”. It will tell you how to work around Windows being cute on you.
well… I got the fonts to upload (thanks for pointing out that hint to me!) but it’s still not finding them. I guess I’ll look at it when i get home and can actually connect via FTP and see if the files are actually there. Other than that I can’t figure out what’s wrong.
As an aside… you’re site is wickedly cool. I don’t suppose you do WP themes too, huh? Or offer this one (or something similar) to your adoring public?
Hi! I was wondering if you could help with a little problem I am having with that great plug-in of yours. sadly it only works with the first post, al posts afterwards are just normal letters. do you have any ideas? thanks
Kathy, that generally means that you’ve missed a modification of one of the
the_title()invocations in your template. The plugin will only replace those invocations that are modified to prepend the-image-to the text.One thing that you’ll have to make sure of is that the web server process has permission to read and execute the uploads folder. Otherwise the plugin will be unable to search for fonts in that folder.
Thanks! No, I don’t do themes primarily because I’m no designer. I couldn’t design my way out of… you get the idea. Design comes very hard for me, so I don’t enjoy it that much. I like when I get something that actually works, but that’s about it.
That said, all of my theme files are viewable. You can pull up each of the source of them with an URL that looks like:
http://www.coldforged.org/source/view_source.php?s=index.phps
Where the final parameter is the file name which would be one of the following: archives.phps, header.phps, index.phps, comments.phps, page.phps, sidebar.phps, style.css, archive.phps, footer.phps, single.phps.
Hi! I am back! Ich checked my code and I couldnt find anymore “the_title” tags other than the permalink one, that you are not supposed to change and the one that I already edited. Oh and, if I turn off the soft shadows, it stops working at all. I am posting my template’s index here, so you can have a look, I am clueless.
whoopsie! that didnt work quite as expected. how do I post code??? man I feel dumb…
hmmm…because wordpress is apparently set on making me look like an unintelligent fool, by “make sure of is that the web server process has permission to read and execute the uploads folder.” do you mean make sure that my wordpress folder has the read and execute permissions set?
sometimes I don’t know what I was thinking when I decided to move from blogger and do it myself. It’s a lot harder than it looks.
GAH! I happened on chance to the WP thread (http://wordpress.org/support/topic.php?id=28368) where you suggested adding “remove_filter(‘the_title’, ‘wptexturize’);” to the plugin. Well it FIXED my quote and elipsis problem! I guess you discovered it was fixable after all, eh?
well, I think wordpress officially hates me because I can’t get this plug-in to work. nor can I get your spell checker one to work either. i’m obviously a technotard. ha!
say.. I don’t suppose I could just steal your source code for comments.phps and see if it will make things work on my end, huh? huge grin I can’t even get my gravatars to show up and I had (originally, it’s not there now) installed that plugin too.
so for now I am content to just come look at your blog on a daily basis and live vicariously through your cool looking and properly functioning blog.
Steve, I meant to post here when I realized that it worked and promptly forgot to. Yeah, as I was reading what the guy wrote and remembering our experiences it occurred to me that maybe the overall problem was the HTML entities WP was converting the text to. It was a real shot in the dark, but apparently has some merit. I’m glad it’s gotten you sorted out!
Absolutely, that’s why it’s there. I have zero problems with you doing whatever it takes to get things going. As a last resort I have on several occasions gotten people that have particularly tricky problems to create a temporary login on their blogs for me to hop in and see if I can track down problems. If you have no success with this plugin, maybe we can go that route.
Good luck.
so much for my thieving ways…copy and pasting the php file sort of wiped out all my comments. ha! of course i hasn’t edited my information in, but i don’t know if it’ll make much of a difference.
i feel like i am spamming you with questions, i’m so sorry! i just get so frustrated when i can’t figure out what i am doing and i find wordpress and php so darned confusing! i’m all for letting you poke around in my wordpress and helping me out. if you’d like to send me an email and offer your services i’d be SO appreciative!
Yup, I’m a happy camper now (though to be absolutely anal, it gives me straight quotes not curly ones, which sucks but I can live with it and I wish there was a way to apply styling such as bold or italic, but I’m sure that’s beyond the capabilties of this plug-in so I’ll stfu now
Hi! me again, I was wondering if there is any chance of anyone giving me some help at all, since I already checked the tags, where I was supposed to change the code, and they are ok, but still, I am only getting the plug-in to work on the first post.
help— anyone????
Could you perhaps provide the URL to your site so that I can take a look?
Can you add an opacity control to the ‘formats’ part of the extended format, so I can use a transparent background on other text, and use a background on my titles?
Interesting request, I’ll see what I can do.
I’m not even sure if I want to use this or not, but I’m trying to get it working, so I can see it live and decide. I am using the GrubbySlipcovers template. I go into the index.php file in the GrubbySlipcovers template directory and find the only instance of the_title(); and change it to the_title(‘-image-’); instead. When I load my page, my only available post comes up as:
-image-A letter home
And if I remove the ‘-image-’ from the index, it instead comes up as:
A letter home
But in neither case does it come up graphically (of course, I wouldn’t expect it to in the 2nd case). I can’t figure if I’m editing the wrong file, or if something about the GrubbySlipcovers template makes it not work. In the configuration for Title Images, I have no problem seeing the sample graphical output, so I assume it is installed correctly. I used one-click install, copied the .ttf file to my server, and pointed the plugin to the correct directory. I tried copying the_title(‘-image-’) from the installation/configuration instructions page and pasting it, just in case I was somehow typing it incorrectly, but that still did nothing for me.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Randy
grr! argh!
sorry just needed to get that out. ok.. i have reread this entire comment page and i am sort of having the same problems as ref’d in 154, 156, 158 and 159.
i changed the code to this:
well.. what do you know? the rest of my comment vanished. i didn’t even notice that.
alrighty then.. in short: i changed the code where i was supposed to and yet 1) i still have no preview in options, and when i load the page i first get a little box that tells me it’s trying to find an image but then the regular text title just appears – in FireFox that is. in IE there’s not even a post title.
all my images are cacheing just fine where they are supposed to be, they just aren’t showing up on my blog. i don’t get it. currently i have the plugin deactivated, so i have that lovely -image- thing in front of all my titles. but it’s too late for me to worry about that now. i’m tired.
in case you want to poke around and find out what’s what you’re still a user in my system with all the same info i gave you last time.
thanks!
Is there any way to put php tags into the headline usage of this plugin?
For example, I want to make the author of the comments formatted using this plugin.
I want to replace the “Whatever text” with the WP tag for comment_author.Yes, though it requires a bit more work. Put this somewhere in the file that’s to have this:
Then, wrap the the stuff you want rendered with the following code:
Works great! Thanks!
Is there anyway to activate plugins without having to click the activate button or pass the url called by clicking the button. For the life of frogs I cannot get any plugins to activate on tripod lycos
Does the activate button update a file I can manually edit, or perhaps something I can manually insert in nysql?
There’s a row in the options table that is called
active_plugins. That’s the row that contains which plugins are activated. However, manually editing that row is completely inadvisable as it is non-trivial and very error-prone.Not to mention, if you’re having trouble merely activating a plugin on your hosting provider, it’s doubtful that you’d have much success in getting the plugin — which involves far trickier code and requires many prerequisites in the form of library versions and configurations — functional even if you got the
active_pluginsrow correct.Hey ColdFOrged, I sent you an email with my index.php file did you get it? it was about the plugin only being shown in first post. please let me know if you have it, since I am using it on my computer and there is no url I can send you.
Cold Forged, how do I enable the “eval() Content”? because I want to insert the code in my post. I’ve already install Run PHP, but still I don´t know how to execute the PHP code to bring the Image Headline process.
I wish that you would have put system requirements in the entry for the plugin. GD AND FreeType support must be compiled into PHP or as PHP modules for this plugin to work.
Good point… seems obvious to me, but then again I’m the developer. I’ll add it to the description.
I still don’t know how to use the Image Headline inside my post, because I still don’t know what should I do in order to set up and enable this plugin inside my post. I use WP 1.5. May I scream for help?
Ahem…ColdForged is notorious for well documented instructions with examples. Check the very bottom of this page to get your answers.
Good luck.
Not sure how I missed that. I read that page three times looking for the GD and FreeType thing. Oh well. Thanks.
You didn’t miss anything, it didn’t exist before you mentioned it
. Like I said, it was a very good idea so I went ahead and did it right then.
Like Adam said, it’s pretty well documented… go here and scroll down to where it says “Can I use it for things other than titles?”
Ah okay… good call. I thought I was going crazy.
I just added image headlines to my site. It looks like things went off without a hitch. Thanks ColdForged.
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. I already know about how to enable Image Healine in any part of my blog, but it seems that I cannot enable it inside my post. Read the quote: “…Then, wherever you want your text to appear, put in a call to the following function (if in a page or post, be sure to enable the “eval() Content†option):…” Now that you read it, tell please, and this is what I was asking, how do I ” enable the “eval() Content†option ” ? Thanks to everybody.
If you’ve installed RunPHP the “eval() Content” checkbox should be in the “Discussion” area of the advanced editing page.
Alright I had this plugin running perfectly for a month… today I deactivated some of my plugins; I also uninstalled image headlines. When I went back, installed, and activated image headlines it started screweing up.
When a font is specified, the options page only shows “This is a preview of your current settings. Save your settings to update the preview.” and it ends there. So I delete the font file, and I can see the options page again, but obviously then I can’t use any font.
So, uhm… help! panic
Justin,
While you have the font removed (or simply in a different folder) try changing your preview text to something short, like “Test”. Then put the font back and see if you’re okay.
I’m having the same problem as in comments 126/127 At this point I’ve recompiled PHP 6 or 7 times. Oddly enough during the ./configure process i can see the configure trying the TTF->image Gd routines and exiting with success. But i still get the fatal error when i enable the plugin.
phpinfo.php says Gd is enabled
Here are my build options: ‘./configure’ ‘–with-zlib-dir=/usr/local ‘ ‘–with-libjpeg=/sw ‘ ‘–with-libtiff=/sw ‘ ‘–with-libpng=/sw ‘ ‘–with-gd’ ‘–with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql ‘ ‘–with-xml’ ‘–with-dom=/sw’ ‘–with-apxs’ ‘–with-freetype=/sw ‘ ‘–with-ttf–enable-gd-native-ttf’
I’m running OSX 10.3.8 php version 4.3.10 GD Version bundled (2.0.28 compatible)
Any help would be appreciated.
Not sure. This is my build and it works fine:
‘./configure’ ‘–with-apxs=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs’ ‘–with-xml’ ‘–enable-bcmath’ ‘–enable-calendar’ ‘–enable-ftp’ ‘–with-gd’ ‘–with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local’ ‘–with-png-dir=/usr’ ‘–with-xpm-dir=/usr/X11R6′ ‘–enable-magic-quotes’ ‘–with-mysql=/usr’ ‘–enable-discard-path’ ‘–with-pear’ ‘–enable-sockets’ ‘–enable-track-vars’ ‘–with-ttf’ ‘–with-freetype-dir=/usr’ ‘–enable-gd-native-ttf’ ‘–enable-versioning’ ‘–with-zlib’
I think the important part is what Aaron had:
–with-freetype-dir=/usr, though obviously you’ll need to match directories.–with-freetype=/sw
well that sucked, i pasted and wrote this whole thing… and thats all that got posted. Anyways, -with-freetype-dir=/sw caused the configure to fail.
Ok, i finally got it solved…it turns out Fink OSX’s 3rd party package manager didnt actually install freetype, and i had to do it myself. All is good now. Thanks for putting me on the right path.
Uh oh. I tried changing the color of my font and now I can’t get it to generate any new images. When I revert back to the old font color I had, my old images show up, but new ones won’t. I’ve tried deactivating, deleting, and reinstalling the plugin, but nothing seems to work. My uploads directory is still CHMOD 666 also. Any ideas?
This plugin has been working wonderfully for me for the past month or so. I go to make a post entitled “I Hate Spatial Nautilus” and I get the following error:
I then tried a few more titles, “test” works, but “Test” does not. Nor does “wtfmate,” “wtf,” “wtf mate,” or “mate.” I looked at the line in question (790) but found nothing out of place.
What’s up with this? I have never encountered this error before… Other than that, however, great plugin…
oso, there wouldn’t be an error log around, would there? I note you’re on Dreamhost, they may have changed something in the PHP configuration behind your back. If you were to delete all your images likely none would show up. If you can find an error log — since Dreamhost apparently has error display turned off — it would be helpful.
satoshi, oddly enough it sounds like a similar situation. The reason it works for “test” is that you’ve likely done it before and it’s pulling up the cached version. Try deleting all of the images in your image cache directory and I’ll bet you get no new ones. I’d ask your host why they suddenly got rid of FreeType support when they recompiled PHP.
Odd that both of you would be hit with similar things today. You’re on different hosts, I already checked
.
I did notice that several of my server’s processes and such had failed while it was up, so maybe that has something to do with it. The server’s entirely down right now, so I can’t really check anything.
Yo.
As with most WP forums, I found attention to detail and helpfulness here.
I’ll venture a question, eh?
Got the plug-in. Got it to work.
But. . .
Lost the permalink, and the individual post does not have the images but it does have the permalink.
Weird, eh?
Look here: Haight and Asbury pt.1
And here: F a t h e r L u k e . com
At Father Luke.com the images show up – but no permalink On the individual page, permalink, but no image.
Any love here?
Okay, Father Luke
Loads! You’ve probably gathered this already, but looks like something is boofed in your main template and in your single post template. Could you paste the source of those templates here and come back with a permalink to that source? Should be easy to find with a peek at the source.
Okay, Baby.
Here is the single: http://paste.uni.cc/6890
Here is the Index: http://paste.uni.cc/6891
I was horsing around, looking for answers.
Check both pages again before you check the source. I have it where I think it does what I said in my previous question.
By the way,
Here is the permalink to what the index looks like without the images:
http://paste.uni.cc/6892
So, like a before and after look at index.
Big smile, Father Luke
Oh.
One other thing which may be of interest.
If I leave the permalink in, whether it’s the categories, or the archive, the single or the incex . php . I have a box around the image – around the permalink.
That’s why I took the permalink out from the index. It loses the box around the image. (I am using Firefox, but I saw it in IE also. . . )
What I am thinking, as if I really knew how, don’t ya’ know, what I was thinking is that Iwll have to make a seperate item for a permalink somewhere – maybe down by the comments like on ( cover your ears ) Blogger. They have a span there which calls the permalink in a seperatye URI rather than in the post title.
That would mean I have to go through and do this to all the pages – Archive – Single – Index – and then finally – Categories.
I may just have to do that.
How are you doing with all my meandering thoughts on this, okay are you?
Thanks for your attention in this.
For what it’s worth, I am using a Manji and running that theme on Wordpress 1.5-beta-1 2005-01-25
Father Luke
Don’t worry about the box, we’ll get rid of that. Get your permalink back by re-adding line 10 from your original index.php. To get the images on your individual pages you need to make the
the_title()call just like the index one, like so:<?php the_title('-image-'); ?>To get rid of the “box”, see comment #74.
Whoa – cool !
That was a nice surprise.
Lemm’e go see what happens with the single, archive, and category pages.
Is there a work-around for the boxes on those pages, just in case it comes to that ?
Naw, should be controlled by the same CSS selectors so the comment #74 CSS should handle those as well.
Wasn’t.
Some little thing is up, man. I don’t have it buttoned down.
Every pages works, and looks very cool by the way. I really like this.
Anyway, go here: http://fatherluke.com/?cat=5
Obviously it’s the category php.
Here is the code: http://paste.uni.cc/6894
Almost there, man. So very close. . .
Father Luke
Bah, I hate new templates
. Change that CSS from comment 74 to be:
Bah, I hate new templates
Yeah, me too. But I love new code.
You are some kind of genius, because that has it.
I really like this, and I want to thank you.
You may never understand how much I enjoy this. As it’s Daddy, you may be quite proud of how your children are being received in the world and how they reflect nicely on you.
Well done. Very well done indeed. Thank you.
Love, Father Luke
Thanks for the kind words! I’m glad you got it running to your liking.
Thanks for the kind words! That’s my trade, friend. Kind words.
Just as you have the gift of code, so too maybe I have the gift for words.
But know this: You’ve earned the right to see kind words about yourself… everyone who visits here can verify this.
You work hard. Very hard.
I’m glad you got it running to your liking.
Ahhh. See?
You did this. You worked hard.
Please – take a bow for what you’ve done. I’m out of here to enjoy the work which you’ve done for me.
I’ll be over at my website. . .
Thanks again, Father Luke
Hm, alright, my server is working perfectly now, but the plugin is still displaying the same error, almost as if I no longer have that function installed or something…
Alright, the plugin is still having issues even with all the server processes functioning properly and what not. However! That means squat compared to what just happened:
I was changing a setting in the headlines page (I changed the lazy dog thing to Sato’s crazy test “something in quotes” thing. I hit apply, BAM!
Error establishing a database connection
I think the quotes may have caused it… I backed up my database right after this happened, and reloading the database does not help at all…
Any ideas? It’s your plugin =P
I’ve already scoured the database backup and I cannot find the string in question, so… yea… It’s really weird.
The quotes are converted to “safe” entities, so it’s not that. Either your database is diddled — by the hosting provider — or your wp-config.php got mangled. If you’re getting that error, it isn’t the plugin. If the plugin were failing, you wouldn’t even get that far. Sorry.
True, true… I checked my wp-config.php, and it’s fine. I did a database check in cPanel, and it came up with something saying that the sato_comments table had not been closed properly, so I did a repair, checked it again, all was good. Still didn’t work, though… -_-
Bah, Coppermine gives the following error:
Coppermine critical error: Unable to connect to database !
MySQL said: Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client
…
It’s not just WordPress, still doesn’t explain the suddenness though… Plus the other WordPress (1.2) installs on the site are fine…
Neat plugin! Suggestion for next update: Display the format string in use on the Options page to make it easy to copy and paste it into the ImageHeadline_render() function.
Motivation: while the original intention for the plugin was likely just to do fancy post headlines, if you’re gonna offer the ability to generate on-the-fly images for categories, templates, etc., people will likely want to ensure those images don’t change styles when the Post headline styles change globally.
[Postscriptum... The live previews in your comments form is nifty, but it makes typing really sluggish...]
Just quick Question this time(i hope). What actually causes the images to be generated. When a post is published or when someone actually visits the page after the post has been published. I’m having this wierd issue with httpd crashing if i visit the page right after creating a post. If i wait like 5-10 min the page loads up fine. I have crash dumps but i doubt they will be any use. I’m just curious that since I visit my page after every time I post the images are being generated after a crash. But if i dont ever visit the page the server is waiting to crash, and then timeout on the next visitor?
[...] ich, to me, is utterly useless to show to readers — in the comment so people could easily reference previous comments. Since the com [...]
love it.
Is there anyway to use umlaute (like ä, ü, ö) in the plugin? Thanks!
Yes, it works as is. Your font just needs to have the glyphs for those characters in it. You may also have to add the following code to the plugin down at the bottom where the
add_filter()call is.remove_filter(’the_title’, ‘wptexturize’);Here’s an example:
Sorry, in your email are other signs as in your comment here:
remove_filter(’the_title’, ‘wptexturize’);
Ok, i had corrected it (in “remove_filter(‘the_title’, ‘wptexturize’);”) but it doesn`t works! (but without the errors!).
Again, for it to work the font must have those glyphs in it. Try a different font?
Yes, this was the third font i tried. The fonts are frome http://www.dafont.com! There you can try which fonts have glyphs!
Sorry Basti, I don’t really have the time to dig through fonts. How about you try this font. Download the TrueType PC version and install it.
It`s ok, i have installed the font, because now no fonts are displayed if i write ö, ü, ä… why? What could be wrong? The code? But in your example it goes!
Sorry, I don’t understand quite what you’re saying. What is not working now?
For example: I write the sentence “Ich mag Änderungen die übersichtlich sind”. Ok- the plugin render this text without errors, but the image of this text is displayed without the glyphs: “Ich mag nderungen die bersichtlich sind”. Do you understand me now? Sorry for my bad english!
Hi,
Would it be possible for you to provide an option to set spacing between letters in the title? The font I use for example bunches letters much too close and I’d like the image to some space (in pixels) between letters.
If adding this as an option is cumbersome, can you help me add this to the current code?
thanks, vinod
At this point, I have no idea what could be causing it to not display anything, especially if you’re using the font that I specified. Perhaps it’s a server configuration issue, but I really don’t know what it could be. Sorry!
No, Vinod, sorry. I have no control over the kerning that the FreeType library uses when drawing the text. In order to “fake it” you’d have to parse the rather complex data structures of the TTF font file — not something at which PHP is any good — determine the appropriate spacing for each individual letter based on the hinting rules in the TTF file, then render each letter individually based on that information.
Believe me when I say you don’t want to tackle it… just look at the code in the current plugin required to parse the font name out of the TTF files. Now apply that to far more significant portions of files with far odder structures. That’s a sure fast-track to drinking early and often.
Thanks. I’m trying to be a teetotaler – So I guess coding it in is out of question
CF, is it possible to set the alignment of the rendered text? I’d like to align the rendered headline image to the right vs to the left. Is that possible?
I just moved to a new host, and I am working out the bugs.
I get this error:
FATAL: The directory you specified to cache the image files did not exist and I could not create it. Either create it for me or select a different directory.
FATAL: The directory you specified to cache the image files is not writeable from the Apache task. Either select a different directory or make the directory you specified writable by the Apache task (chmod 755 the directory).
Image cache folder (Where images will be cached on your server. MUST be a full path to a folder writeable by the Apache process.)
Here are my questions:
1.) I do have the folder, and it is writable. I have this format in the Image cache folder and URL:
wp-content/images/
Is that correct ?
2.) The images I had propogated while at the other host are visible, and new images are made, and clearly seen with no errors, despite the warning. Should I be worried about the warning?
Weid, but there it is.
Okay, Father Luke
No, not possible at this time.
Try putting the complete pathname in there and see if it helps (e.g.
/home/fatherluke/public_html/wp-content/images/).Tried. No dice. But, weirdly enough, everything works.
I am about to do a clean install of WP on this new host when I get up and running. I just had a two-fifty gig hard drive vaporize on me and I am being sent a new one free of charge by Maxtor. Got’a love ‘em. . . all my stuff is gone, but then that is my problem.
Anyway, if the thing goes bonkers with the new install I will be back. But I don’t guess it will. Weird it has an error but works just fine, eh? Even the optuion to place it wher I whis using he Run Php plug-in. Works great, gereat, great all the way around.
Next up will be the spell check.
Okay, Father Luke
I apologize if someone has already said this, but for all you dreamhost users out there that can’t use runPHP, PHPExec works like a charm with all PHP in posts and pages including image headlines.
And as always, thank you ColdForged for such an amazing plugin and all the support you give.
Oddly, RunPHP works fine for me. I just started hosting with DreamHost little over a week ago. Everything has worked fine. Actually, wait, I did the one-click install of WordPress and RunPHP didn’t work, but downloading the newest version fixed that right up.
This really rocks! I love the flexibilty and the support for all real TTF fonts. Now my site looks much hotter then before!
Thank you very much!
Just installed it tonight and it works great! Is it possible to also have the date show up in the TTF as well?
Absolutely. You’ll want to do something like the following:
<?php echo ImageHeadline_render( the_date('','','',false),'formats' ); ?>where
formatsis your list of format overrides as given in this post.I almost forgot to say:
My website is in German and the provided font in the package doesn’t contain “umlauts”. Maybe you should exchange the ttf with one who has all charachters available. tried alot around within the code to encode to the correct charset until i realized that it is the font itself ^_^
regards, mentor
Well, I’m trying, but I get this error: Warning: imagefill(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /home/henrym/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/image-headlines.php on line 626
Here’s the exact command I’m using in my template:
<?php echo ImageHeadline_render(the_date(),'' ); ?>I can’t understand what’s going on…if I substitute the string ’5/11/2005′ which is what the function should return, it works fine.
Henry, re-read my response carefully and compare to what you’re using
. Here’s yours:
<?php echo ImageHeadline_render( the_date(),'' ); ?>Here’s mine:
<?php echo ImageHeadline_render( the_date('','','',false),'' ); ?>Which is a smart-alecky way of saying “
the_date()echos the date by default, so you have to pass in afalsefor theechoparameter to tell it to return the date instead of echoing.”Thanks! I’d tried both ways without success, and then I finally realized after checking the codex that I can’t call the_date() twice. Once I removed my original text based call and just left in the graphic one, it worked great.
Excellent plugin my friend, its a life saver since the shadow effects are not cross browser compatible yet… its working on my site http://www.arrogantly.com however it works only on the main pages, when I click on the header and go to an individual page, the headline images are absent…. I would most appreciate it if you could help me pin point the problem
I don’t know what template you’re using, but you’ll need to modify whatever template is used to display single posts in the same way that you modified the main template (e.g. the
the_title()call). Typically this is called something likesingle.phpor something.absolutely right… and the template is a personal/custom one which Ive been working on for over 3 months…
As another user post it, i’m having this error
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: imagettfbbox() in /home/spiderwd/public_html/identity/wp-content/plugins/image-headlines.php on line 793
I still can’t imagine where is the problem, for example, when i delete the font from the server, that error disappears. My ISP said he has installed the FreeType plugin.
Please tell me what should i do.
Thanks
Leandro, every time I’ve seen this — mind you, every time — it is because the ISP has not performed all the steps required to get FreeType support compiled into PHP. If you go to your
phpinfo()page, you can see what options were compiled in. It has to have the relevant options from this comment compiled in (the most important of which is typically‘–with-freetype-dir=/usr’) or the TTF functions simply won’t work. PHP doesn’t lie… if it can’t call the function because the function doesn’t exist, then FreeType support is not compiled in.Hi.
Any plans on porting this to Textpattern?
I am using it on a test blog here:
http://fatherluke.com/TestBLAWG/
But. . . I am creating the headlines in wordpress and then linking to the images in txp.
The problem is that the headlines have the number 75 problem. ie, the border around them.
Hello again, Father Luke
My comment got ate.
I was wondering if you were able to port this over to textpattern.
I am creating the headlines in wordpress and then saving the images for txp for a test blaw here:
http://fatherluke.com/TestBLAWG/
I get that number 75 problem: the 1px border, with txp.
Those are some nuggets to think about.
I hope you are doing cool, Father Luke
This is a great plugin, thanks for the great code!
The install was easy, however better install documentation would be good. I would be pleased to write it and submit it to you for you to include in the download.
Also, I did a manual install of the plugin because I could not get the plugin manager to work. I contacted who I thought was the developer of that plugin and he said it is no longer supported and that he could not help. Is there another version of this pluggin manager or did it get taken over by another developer? Thanks for any info, a one click install of plugins would be very cool!
Thanks Again! theMaab
This is an awesome plug-in and just what I have been looking for. BUT despite trying the actions described i comment 73 ( or is it 74 ) I just cant seem to get rid of that border. I am using the boredom theme
I guess my coment was not eaten, it was simply held in moderation. Moderation in all things is wise I hear. . .
I Solved the issue I had inquired about. Not one to leave loose ends. . .
Best, Father Luke
No, I don’t use TextPattern so I have no great desire or impetus to port it over. Someone asked this before on a TP forum and I mentioned that anyone there was welcome to use my code as a starting point for a TP plugin. A search turned up one plugin that does similar things.
Not that I know of. I didn’t realize he had abandoned the software, to be honest.
I don’t see any title images on your site, so it’s a bit tough to debug. I can only recommend something like the suggestion in this comment without seeing the actual end result.
I don’t know if this is the right place for this, but I have a feature request!
It would be truly awesome if the plugin included some functionality to save styles. So I could create different styles of images like “Main Header”, “Topic Title”, etc…and pull them up easily each time I wanted to use/edit one.
And then maybe replace the
the_title(-image-)with something likethe_title(-imageStyleName-)to specify which styles to use where. Would this even be possible?Hi! First of all your plug-in saved my life, and made work so much neater, I bow down to you!
Someone might have brought this up before, and I did my best to go through the 300 over comments to check if you’ve already answered but well… you know.
I was wondering if there’s anyway I can use the plugin to echo wordpress variables… Say I wanted write out how many responses a post has “# responses to “Post Title” ” in the style that I used for all the other stuff?
FANTASTIC plugin, Coldforged. Its ease and simplicity won me over from redoing SIFR again… (‘Twas a big pain to implement the first time ’round, that was.)
However, I’m also using the Boredom theme, and having the same #75 problem. I’ve used your prescribed CSS fix in every place I can think of, yet alas, no luck. Strangely the site renders absolutely just fine in Safari/Mac, but when viewed in Firefox/Mac (and presumably Firefox/PC too), the thin, maybe 1-3px border shows.
Seems everybody else that’s using the Boredom theme is having the same problem. Odd. Very nice theme otherwise, after a bit of tweaking.
Thanks for any help you can offer, Coldforged. Sadly my abilities for CSS comprehension don’t stretch nearly as far as I’d like.
This is as good a place as any. Request noted, I’ll consider it for any possible future version
.
Absolutely. From within your template (within The Loop), to do your example you would use this:
<?php echo ImageHeadline_render( get_comments_number( $post->ID ) . ' responses to "' . get_the_title() . '"' ); ?>My solution to the borders around the images for comment #75 assumed the default theme. The only difference with the Boredom theme is that it doesn’t use a
titleclass for post titles but instead simply has them ash2elements. Not a problem, but obviously a selector based on.titleisn’t going to have any effect on anh2element. This CSS code should do what you intend:[code lang="css"]h2 a img { border: none; }[/code]
Aha! Excellent. That works like a dandy.
As I said, I’m only starting to understand the full spectrum of CSS… but I’m a great copy-and-paster!
Hi – looking forward to using this.
I installed and activated the plugin as per the instructions, I put the image-headlines folder from teh archive in the “wp-content” folder. Found out that it’s supposed to go into the plugins folder – so I moved that folder (with the TTF) in the plugins folder. Options wouldn’t come up, so I copied just the php file naked into the plugin folder. That seemed to get it going.
Question: what’s the correct path for these files to be in?
By the way – good lord – a fantastic plugin. At work here:
http://starsoverkansas.org
I’m sure everyone and their cat has suggested to have the ability pass on the font name to use multiple fonts. That would be greeeat!
Yeah, I never fleshed out the install instructions for the ZIP files. The
image-headlines.phpgoes inwp-content/pluginsand the rest of the files, including the TTF file, go in a folder calledwp-content/image-headlines.woo woo thank you thank you!!!
Hi i’m really interested in your plugin but for some reason it doesn’t work.
I’m using Wp 1.5.1.2 and have followed the instructions to install the plugin. The images are being created as I can see them in the cache folder although nothing displays in the actual website.
I get no error message although when I hover over my headlines i see the following:
XML parsing error not well formed location
and some other error.
I’ll probably revert it back to the way it was by the time you read this message but do visit just in case.
Do you have any ideaS?
Looks like you’ve modified the wrong
the_title()call in your template. You change the one for thetitleattribute of your link instead of for the actual displayed title (e.g.<a href="blah" title="you_changed_this_one"...>you should have changed this one</a>).Hi
Great pluggin..awesome pluggin. I installed it and all works well.
Now i want to get tricky and add the image headline to the sidebar. Anyway i seem to have done it with
<?php echo ImageHeadline_render( 'who is...','font_color=#857C57&font_size=18' ); ?>but everytime i change it to<?php echo ImageHeadline_render( 'who isff...','font_color=#857C57&font_size=18&font_file=/subdomains/blogger/httpdocs/wp-content/image-headlines/font.ttf' ); ?>i get the following error:Warning: is_readable(): open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/subdomains/blogger/httpdocs/wp-content/image-headlines/font.ttf) is not within the allowed path(s): (/home/httpd/vhosts/demsone.com/subdomains/blogger/httpdocs:/tmp) in /home/httpd/vhosts/demsone.com/subdomains/blogger/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/image-headlines.php on line 547 Error: The server is missing the specified font.who isff...Any ideas?
Awesome pluggin cheers!
I would try to use this path for the font instead, based on the error:
/home/httpd/vhosts/demsone.com/subdomains/blogger/httpdocs/wp-content/image-headlines/font.ttfHi thanks for the quick reply.
I tried that now i am getting the following error.
Error: The server is missing the specified font.who isff…
I guess make certain that the font file you’re trying to specify actually exists.
Hey Coldforged,
First of all, thanks for the awesome plugin, it worked right out of the box!
You can see the results here: http://benjoblog.weblogs.us.
The only problem (if you could call it that) is the accumulation of images, since they are cached. I dug through image-headlines.php until I found the portion which checks to see if a cached image exists before creating a new one. Is the only way to eliminate this (the caching of images) to manually change the source code?
I have in mind making the conditional always fail so that the plugin always generates a new image. I’d be equally happy with a solution that automatically clears the cache once a day of all images, but I’m more experienced with Python and Ruby than PHP.
As background, I have a BS in CS, so feel free to get technical with me
Again, thanks for the fantastic plugin, it is in my opinion the best plugin as both a WordPress user and a programmer 
You aren’t the first person to bring that up and you certainly wouldn’t have been the last. So, I’ve produced an updated version that adds automatic clearing of older cached images. There’s a new option in the options page to determine how long to keep image files in the cache. Current default is two weeks, but there’s no reason you can’t make it one day. Give it a shot.
Thanks for the suggestion.
where can I download the plugin now, as the plugin manager seems to be unavailable as of now???
Hi Coldforged… Great plugin! it’s just what i’m looking for. I am working on a new blog and i am using your plugin for the titles. However i’m not gettin’ it to work on the rest of the page, say.. sidebar titles… or anything. I am installed the RunPHP plugin, which i’ve been looking for a while in the page you link.. ( it throws a 404 error of that post ), but when i call the function
<?php echo ImageHeadline_render( 'Whatever text','font_color=#F00&font_size=20&shadow_spread=5' ); ?>it doesn’t work. Any help will be welcome, and sorry for my english if it’s bad.. i’m south american =).Best regards
There’s a tarball and a zip file available on the main plugin page.
It’s hard to say what you’re doing incorrectly without seeing the code. Could you paste your template to a pastebin and post the URL here?
what’s the changelog for 2.5 -> 2.6 ??
Good question.
I love this plugin, thanks for all your hard work. I’m going to be using it with the Kubrick default template 1.5.1. I would like to be able to have the website title in header to match all headlines in font style. Where exactly would I insert and what would I insert.(which file, which line, etc..) thanks! Ron
Ron, open up your header.php file in the theme you are using and look for:
Replace:
With:
Then check out http://www.coldforged.org/image-headlines-plugin-for-wordpress-15/ for additional settings you can do to it.
Thank you for your reply. I followed your instructions exactly – but, now I receive a parse error page when trying to view my site. When I looked up what a parse error was, it that it us usually due to a missing quote mark or other closing. Could you please check the code you posted once more and see if something is missing. What I put in my header.php matches what you posted exactly. Thanks!
Actually what he posted was correct. Perhaps you could post your header.php code here and post the resulting URL here so we can take a look.
I posted the header.php where you instructed.
http://pastebin.com/300115
Hey ! I just discovered what a novice I am – I didn’t know I was supposed to change where it says ‘site name’, to the actual name of my site. It now shows as intended.
Ron, looking at the code you posted in pastebin I see that on line 5 charset is not ‘black’ because the quote is missing right before it.
Try changing:
content=”< ?php bloginfo(‘html_type’); ?>;
to:
content=”< ?php bloginfo(‘html_type’); ?>;”
(without the space between the ‘<’ and the ‘?php’)
Thanks Gary, I will check into that and see results. But, my simply changing “site name” to the actual name of my site has caused it to appear. All I then needed to do was to adjust the style sheet to position it correctly. But now I have it rendering in Firefox beautifully, and showing in IE within a white box. what can I do to fix this? Oh, and I also have a fine dashed white line running around the border of each letter. What might cause this?
Did you read that page I posted for you? It shows the different settings you can do to the headlines. Mine is on a blue background, so I set the shadow colors to match as closely as possible, and bit darker so that there is still somewhat of a shadow. The IE problem is mostlikely caused by you setting a background color, IE hates PNG, so there is some difficulty there.
You were right in your last post – if I remove the background color, it renders perfectly in Firefox, now shows a black background in IE. Please see my site for example;
http://www.ronpemberton.com
Does it have to be a png? could it not be a jpeg? Wouldn’t this work in both Firefox and IE. I know png saves on bandwidth, but if I’m just rendering a few titles it shouldn’t hurt too bad.
Not necessarily, though that’s the only format the plugin currently supports. I simply haven’t found it important enough to add in support for outputting GIF files (which would be the only format that would help in your case as it’s the only other format that supports transparency and which IE actually displays transparent correctly).
If I get some spare time I’ll experiment with it.
Oh and many thanks to Ensellitis and GaryP for hopping in with help. It’s nice to not have to field every support question
. Thanks guys.
No problem, it’s the least I can do since you created these great plugins =)
Hello,
I absolutely love your plugin ~ so much so I’ve been using it on three sites that I maintain (creepigurl.com, scarecrow.la & bradleyboi.net). The plugin has worked fantastically on all three sites until recently when it stopped functioning on one site only (www.scarecrow.la). I haven’t made any major changes on scarecrow.la between the time the plugin last functioned and when I realized it was not functioning. The only changes I recall would be installing and activating the gravatar & gravatar sign up plugin (which I did to each site). I’m not even sure the gravatar installs are related to this error or if, once again, Dreamhost changed something (frustrating).
Anyway ~ the problem I am having is this error:
Unknown Error creating file.
After reinstalling, configuring, etc. I still received the same error. I’ve googled, searched the comments above, WordPress forums & Dreamhost forums to no avail. I’m afraid I may have been looking so hard for an answer I may have overlooked the obvious solution. Any suggestions? The site just doesn’t look the same without the image headlines ;-p
Thanks,
Jo/Creepi
For some odd reason the image headlines plugin on my site is still functioning [...]
I think my previous comment was eaten by a spam-catcher (I posted the addresses of my 3 sites using the plugin). In any event ~ I posted the problems I am having in my own blog: http://www.creepigurl.com/?p=763
Yup, that’s a weird one. It can’t be a permissions thing because that’s checked separately. Is it possible that the user partition has run out of space? Try going in and clearing out all of the images from the image cache folder (should have filenames like
b4adec617a12eb7ad1.png). Also, take a look in yourwp-content/pluginsdirectory for a file callederror_log. See if it has anything to say about this.Oh and P.S. your comment wasn’t lost it was sitting in moderation. If you post using the same user information subsequent comments will show up just fine. FYI.
Thanks for replying so quickly. It doesn’t seem space is an issue (unless I misunderstand what you’re stating ~ which is entirely possible as my area of ‘expertise’ is the less complicated field of Human Resources). Also, every image in the image cache folder was over 14 days old (and subsequently dumped) except for the lone image belonging to the post dated June 3. I’ve deleted the final image ~ unfortunately there has been no change. I did not find evidence of an error log, either.
I’ve compared the settings/permissions/etc. of scarecrow.la with creepigurl.com and it all seems to be similar (the exception being the permissions on the font files differed ~ since corrected without any change). I know I’m missing something simple…and I’ll obsess over it until I have to go to work in the morning =) I just don’t like the way the site appears without the plugin (heheh…something has to make up for the lack of content).
After I submitted my last comment it dawned on me that my previous comment was in moderation. Apparently my habit of speaking before I think carries over to my typing.
I see the error was fixed. You should post what the solution was incase it happens to someone else…
Yeah, I should though it’s hard to recognize. In this case the problem was that the directory specified as the cache directory was outside the PHP
open_basedirpaths. Somehow it passed all of the plugins checking for being writable but when it came right down to it, PHP couldn’t write the file because of theopen_basedirrestriction. Correcting the cache path fixed the issue.In the future I need to come up with a way to tell if it’s really possible to write into the cache directory, perhaps by actually creating a throw-away file during the options screen loading.
I just installed ‘Image Headlines’. Thank you It is such a creative, fun plug-in.
Hi, First of all, I’m sorry I might not be post this comment in the right place, but I can’t find any contact forms, thus I think the plugin section might be the most appropriate. I like your navigation bar very much, and would like to know where I can get this plugin; I can find it nowhere in coldforged. Thanks in advance.!
Actually there is no plugin to do it, it’s HTML and CSS. I have no writeup on exactly how I did mine. This guy has a writeup on a method very much like it that should show you how to accomplish it.
Just dropping a line about your Image Headlines plugin. GREAT stuff! It really helps to make the site much more aesthetically pleasing. Thank you for teh time and effort it took to put this together, very much worth it.
Coldforged. Thanks very much for your links. I’ve tried hard tonite with the codes, but failed. I came to your site through Janicek.com who also uses a nav bar exactly the same as yours. It’s really nice and I love it very much. If you don’t mind, could you share with me? Would appreciate very very much. The nav bar is one of the last problems I wanna solve this last 10 days. Really, thanks a lot!
LOL, it is EXACTLY the same… =) Anyways, it is just simple CSS… Here, read this. Then you can alter it… And I’m sure ColdForged, or that other site wouldn’t mind you peeking at thier CSS to see how they did thiers…
Ensellitis, Thanks. I have read Liew’s code, but I like Coldforged’s more.
Basically, it is in essence the same… Just tweak with the code. Also, check out this source and the stylesheet for a reference… I’m sure that would be ok, would it ColdForged? Just don’t rip it and use it exactly as it is, make it your own, not just a copy…
Umm, Curious… how do you “preform a ‘tar xvzf headline-image.tar.gz’ “?
Since the one-click plugin installer has been taken offline, and I’m new to wordpress, it might be helpful if your instructions were a little clearer.
Thanks
Great work. I’ll install and give it a try.
Erica, if you don’t know how to use a tarball, then you probably don’t need to use one. Just download the zip file, place warp1.ttf into your wp-content/ folder, and image-headlines.php into wp-content/plugins.
Can’t remember if I’ve already said so, but I’m using your plugin and it’s great.
HELP! I really want to use this plugin but cannot find “the_title()” anywhere in the theme template I am using (FastTrackl — http://wpthemes.info/posts/2005/03/21/fasttrack-the-most-wanted/) can I get this to work without that?
The code appears in the
post.phpfile in that theme. Here’s the code modified to work with the plugin:[code lang="php"]
< ?php the_title("-image-"); ?>< ?php edit_post_link('(edit this)'); ?>
< ?php wp_link_pages(); ?>
[/code]
What a splendid plugin. I just discovered it, and it was the perfect addition to the site I’m building for my girlfriend’s classroom. http://www.mstatham.com It was quite easy to install both in the `get_title` tag as well as insert the `echo` in a template. Thank you.
ok, i try to use this.. but.. i have an error.. is this.. Fatal error: Call to undefined function: imagettfbbox() in /home/*********/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/image-headlines.php on line 849 what’s happening?
Please see this comment and the follow-up.
I read an earlier post where you said to add a certain piece of code to .title a in the CSS to get rid of the border around the png. I cannot find where to modify this.
Thanks.
I had a question about SEO and using an image for the title. If the search engines index text and titles heavier than the actual content. How will Yahoo/Google know what the title of the blog entry is if it’s an image?
Yours is the same case as the one referenced in this comment.
Good question. Obviously the images put the title in the
.
alttext but that might not be enough. Therefore, if you’ll notice in my template, I actually put an extra title in there in aspanwith the style set tostyle="display: none;". This way the title is actually in there even if not displayed. Does it suffice for search engines? I have no clue. But I’ve never been big into SEO, anywayWhen I go to the headlines option, where it says “This is a preview of your current settings. Save your settings to update the preview. “
It gives me the following error message below it, no preview:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: imagettfbbox() in /mnt/web_k/d38/s32/a0004tng/www/talk/wp-content/plugins/image-headlines.php on line 849
Any idea what I’ve done wrong?
Thanks a lot, worked perfectly.
Please see this comment along with the follow-up (or this one, or this one, or this one, or even this one
).
Note to self: I still need to put that as one of the functions to check for.
I’m having trouble getting the Image-Headlines plug-in to work. I tried installing the previous version but I could never get it to work.It would never create the png images for the titles and when you tried to go into options it would give this weird error message. I went ahead and tried upgrading to the most recent version to see if that would help.
Now it appears that it’s trying to create the image files. When I go under options Instead of showing the preview I keep getting a box with a red x in it and when I look at the titles for my entries on my main page I get the same thing. If I look into the wp-content folder I can see where it’s trying to put the png files. I initially thought this might be a permission issue so I played around with the settings but I kept getting the same thing. I also thought I might have changed the wrong title call but from what I’ve been reading I don’t think this is the case. So I contacted Siteground to make sure that GD and Freetype support was enabled just so I could eliminate the obvious. They sent me the link to my phpinfo page and evrything is there. I also installed a couple of different fonts just to make sure it wasn’t an issue with the version I downloaded and I still keep getting the same thing. I decided to check to see if I was generating any kind of errors and when I checked the log I saw I was getting a message that stated “[error] [client ...] File does not exist: /home/mytimein/publichtml/wp-content/6854f9025f7cla748909aee7b36c30b3.png”. Followed by “[error] [client ...] File does not exist: /home/mytimein/publichtml/404.shtml”. I’m kind of at wit’s end and I’m not sure what it is that I’m doing wrong and I can’t seem to be able to fix it.
I upgraded WordPress to the most recent version and I’m currently using the default Kubrick theme. Any ideas as to what might be going on? Here’s the code for my index file:
http://pastebin.com/307811
Thanks for the detailed information. Looks like you’re almost there because the images are being created (see this one for instance). It looks like the setting for “Cache folder” is incorrect… from what I can see you have it set to
"/wp-content/". Try setting it to “/blog/wp-content/” and see if that helps.Hi CF,
Thanks for making this plugin for all us WP users, and for answering all our troubleshooting questions. I’ve got a problem that I don’t believe has been covered before (read through all 397 comments
). Maybe you can help.
I installed the plugin with no problem, but when I view the preview image, it shows up completely in yellow.
Through a bunch of experimenting, I’ve discovered that the yellow showing up is actually the shadow (which according to the default settings should be grey).
No matter what color I specify (using correct HTML format) for the shadow, it always shows up as yellow. Background color changes without a problem. Actual text never shows up. I’ve tried changing the actual text color, no change.
When I turn off shadows, no text appears at all. All other settings seem to be performing correctly (text size, shadow spread, etc).
You can see a sample here. To produce this image, my font color was set to #BB0000, my background color set to #EEEEEE, and soft-shadow color set to #000.
In case you need it, php on my host definitely has GD and freetype enabled. GD is bundled version 2.0.28 compatible.
Thanks for any help you may be able to provide!
Hah! I’m firmly convinced that 98% of the world’s population has used this plugin at some point in time and they’ve experienced everything that it is possible to experience
.
That said, someone had this same problem a while ago, and here’s the explanation I came up with for him which at least got him working somewhat. This is a PHP/GD/Freetype/installation issue of some type, but an accurate solution is harder to come up with. Good luck!
That worked! Thanks for your incredibly prompt help!
crap, I so much wanted to use this plugin, I think it’s great. My provider is not as open to suggestion as I’d like them to be.
Hey, Thanks that did it. I really appreciate this. I’m kind of a newbie with this and I’m still trying to feel my way around. When I get everything working right with my page as far as format and everything I’ll post a link. Thanks again!!!
Ref Jafar’s
Ref Jafar’s comment and your response He received this error.
function: imagettfbbox() in /…/plugins/image-headlines.php on line 849
CF I read your post the noted the GD lib provided by the host. Here is the question.
I have three blogs all under the same host and domain. All three use your image headlines plugin and have for quite a while with no problems. I just posted an article on one blog and the image title returned the above error except it gave the line as 780, vice line 849.
I quickly checked my other two blogs and found them to be working OK and title images are being displayed. If this is a host problem why would it create a problem on only one blog and not all three?
Oops, looks like I may have answered my own question.
I just made a new entry on one of the other three blogs in question. Upon publishing it, it returned the same error.
Looks like my host has changed something within the last 12 hours and no longer support GD lib. Sorry.
Off Iu go to file a support ticket.
UPDATE:
Finally, after a 5 hour wait for my host to respond to an “urgent” request, I get a response.
To quote the host: “We did in fact recompiled PHP version 4.3.11 which included GD Libraries (Version 2.0.15). We had to do this to install postgreSQL last night.
We will check how or what could ahve caused your WP plugin not to work.”
That ver of PHP is the same as the previous one. Does the addition of postgreSQL have an effect?
Hello. I think there is a problem when the “enable shadows” is unchecked. When you clickt the update changes button, it slows considerably it will result into a timeout.
UPDATE II
All is working. My host recompiled the php program. One other note, they claim to have set up a new WP install added your plugin and all was working as normal on that install after they did the recomplilation of php.
Then they moved my blog to that same server and it still had the errors. At present it is back on the original server and operating OK.
Now I’m far from an expert but that sounds like BS to me, and it wouldn’t be the first time a finger got pointed in my direction before they pulled their head out and realized a problem was on their end.
Odd, I don’t get that behavior. What happens when you reload the options page?
Glad you got things mostly sorted out, Marc. Overall I call BS too. If the plugin says
imagettfbbox()doesn’t exist, it means that the function doesn’t exist. Generally that happens when they don’t include the correct options in the command line to compile PHP (see previous comments for the particular options). Unless something in the linkage for your particular blog installation was incorrect — a long shot, to be sure — there’s no way that one installation on the machine will work when another installation on that same machine wouldn’t.Now, I’m no expert. I don’t run a Unix box so I don’t know the ins and outs of getting everything configured. But to me it sounds like bunk
.
hi everyone! first things first! thank you Mr.ColdForged
i just got the plugin to work after struggling a bit with folders… but now, as its running, i already love it! great work!
but you mentioned some posts before, when talking about SEO that you have an extra-title (display:none) … which i think is a bit dirty. when thinking about this, first thing that comes into mind is to set it as background -image.
So here’s my idea & question: when looking at csszengarden entry number 128 you’ll see the following technique in the navigation:
<h3><span>The title</span></h3>where the CSS gives the h3 a negative margin-left: -999em so the text isn’t visible (OK, for SEs it is, but thats what we all want right?!) and a background-image, containing the fancy font… (thats shown to visitors)
so which way to go in order to convert this using your plugin? normally i would try to work this out on my own, but I’m pretty new to PHP and i would simply have to spent months just staring at your code without any progress …
so, maybe others would also appreciate a workaround for this and you’d like to help get this to work.
1) my first idea was to just set the created image to display:none, but then the tricky part for me would be to get the freshly-created images’ name, in order to put em in the bg…
Is that possible?
2) maybe its more simple to use the “command-line” that works with RunPHP or PHP Exec? but the tag explained in your plugin-description produces a complete ![]()
-element, so as we just need the source of this image (or at least the image-name) for the background-solution… – maybe you have an idea…
greets from bavaria/germany (sorry for my broken english)
another thing i forgot: there is a really dirty (activeX) hack for png-transparency working just great in the IE, so this link might be helpful for everyone who got angry with the way IE displays png-images:
http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/pngbehavior/demo.html
(or simply dont want to wait until IE7, Longhorn, or whatever)
I installed the tar file, put the “image-headlines” folder (that included the font) under my /wp-content folder, and then put the php file called “image headlines” in my plugins folder, but it still does not work. I also went ahead and went into my index file and changed the “thetitle();” to “thetitle(‘-image-’);”, but it is still not working. I also activated the plug-in, as well. I’m working on changing the look of the site, but I’m trying it on my husband’s blog. His blog is at: http://krisandapril.us/buffalostampede
Please help me.
Oh crap. Didn’t Chmod it to the right numbers. My bad.
no ideas on comment #410 ?
Erik, sorry I’ve been busy.
It sounds as though you want to define some inline CSS before the various headlines and have it set a background image property of the appropriate filename. You’re welcome to do this, of course. Note that you haven’t listed the only tricky parts… you’ll have to output the CSS prior to each post and have a separate class for each of those
<h3>elements that you’re wanting to change. You’ll have to output the inline CSS section with the appropriate selector (e.g.h3 .post1 {}) then the actual post.Modifying the plugin to output, for instance, just the background image name (e.g.
background: url(images/headlines-cache/eabd188a88c88aed.png))would be reasonably trivial. Open the plugin in the editor of choice and search for the text “
<img src” without the quotes. That’s where the output string is created. Modify it to only return the relative path and get rid of the sizing and stuff.That said, negative margins don’t seem too much less dirty than a
And your English is perfectly fine and is infinitely better than my German.
display:nonespan.wow, thank you so much! i’ll try it as soon as possible (tomorrow) - and btw have to apologise:
(please don’t mind if i do so – even if you might wish i would donate instead – but i’m a poor guy :-O who won’t forget you if i get rich 
)
margin-left, was an error, as it would hide all of the<h3>(image-headline and “normal” text) –> so i was wrong, its actuallytext-indent: -999emwhat might also seem to be quite dirty, but regarding Search-Engines’ ability to “read” images and in order to have a semantic markup this is the way i prefer to insert the headline-images… so thank you again for the fast response and be prepared for me to “praising your plugin to the skies” tomorrowI finally got it working the way i wanted: Now the Headline Image is the Background-Image of an
<h3>element (well, in my case it’s h3 – one could use anyh1-6following the logic of your documents structure)I’ve only changed two lines in the plugin: I changed line 599 into:
$retVal = "background: url($generated_url) no-repeat; height: $height"."px; width: $width"."px; " ;and line 789 into:
$retVal = "background: url($generated_url) no-repeat; height: ".$box['height']."px; width: ".$box['width']."px; " ;In my CSS i’ve got the declaration to hide the pure text:
h3 {text-indent: -999em; display: block;}h3 a {display: block;}the display: block for the anchor is important to make the title-image clickable – as the text, that was clickable by default isn’t appearing because i’ve moved it outside with a negative text-indent.
In my WordPress-Template, the line that produces the headline and its link to a complete article looks like this:
<h3 style="<?php the_title("-image-"); ?>"><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>The difference to this plugins’ documentation is, that the image headline only shows up in the inline-styles of the headline, so when watching the site without css, or with a handy (or not to forget the way search-engines do) no headline-image shows up, what is exactly what i wanted.
So theres no need for an additional WordPress
the_title()-tag.I hope this might also be useful to others…
One question regarding your post: why do i need the appropriate selector as you mentioned below? (h3 .post1)
cheers and thanks again for this great piece of work and especially for sharing it with everyone! I also love the way it renders “standard” fonts like the Georgia. Awesome! I actually never noticed how bad Windows is doing its job regarding fonts before i tried your plugin… :-/
[note: the line breaks aren't in my code -that's just in this comment]
The way you’re doing it — inline CSS as a
styleattribute in the actual<h3>element — means that you don’t have to do what I was talking about. Nice work! I’m impressed with this solution.trivial
Hi,
I’ve been using your plugin since version 2.4 and it’s been working just fine until I changed the hosting provider (my site is now on MediaTemple). The rendering goes fine, so I understand the server fulfills any technical requierement.
The thing is, special characters are not appearing as they should. And I’m not talking about too-special-characters: it’s just spanish (so the only ones I would need are á, é, Ã, ó, ú and ñ).
They were working without trouble before and, as I say, the server is the only thing I’ve changed: the options are all the same, the typeface is the same (and it does have the special characters I require).
Any clue, anyone?
two things i forgot: when using background: url($generatedurl) you might keep the mac/ie from finding the image as this browser don’t like single or no no-quotes, so it needs the double quotes! so you better try this: background: url(“$generatedurl”)
and the other thing is that implementing the headline-image the way i described might (no: it surely will) crashes the command-line version. so make sure you only use it for certain wp-elements… with kind regards
That’s a weird one. I haven’t a clue what would be different on the server that would cause such an effect. I’ll keep my ear to the ground though. Sorry you’re having trouble.
Thanks for the answer, I’ll keep coming back in case a solution is found (and will search elsewere, as well). The plugin is great, anyway ;o)
WONDERFUL comment! Thank you! It’s so nice to be free of having my headers be in Verdana, Arial, or Times New Roman.
Excellent, excellent plugin.
silentcolors, i’m wondering you can even use special characters in your posts titles :-O as WordPress generates the permalinks out of these… strange you didn’t get any errors so far. For example: German Special characters are these: äÄ, öÖ, üÜ what when used in Titles causes a lot of problems with WP. in this special case – (german) there is a plugin that fixes that wp-behavior http://otaku42.de/2005/06/30/plugin-o42-clean-umlauts/ i’d like to know how you use to write these characters (espagnol-ones) &#charactercode; ? didn’t that affect the permalinks?
Erik, I’ve been using them from the beginning and had absolutely no problem, as I said, not even with this plugin (image headline), until now. And no, I did not have any problem with permalinks either: I used to write my titles with their special characters (á, é, Ã, ó, ú or ñ) and all, and WordPress would automatically ‘sanitize’ those titles for the post-slug — which is what actually is used for permalinks, not the actual titles.
Strange that you didn’t get the same ‘conversion’ with german characters, now you mention it.
Wow, this looks really really cool. Just found it by accident…. Would anyone know how to implement this type of thing in Movable Type, or should I switch to WP?
I installed the image-headlines plugin and it works fine, but when i click under the admin screen on the new button “headlines”, nothing happens. What could be wrong ? Some ideas ?
in short:
it was a conflict with the headspace plugin
http://www.urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace
…after deactivating this plug the admin screen appeared.
…but why can´t they work together properly ? Is it possible to manage this in new versions of the image-headlines plug ?
Bernd,
What version of WordPress are you running?
gravatar looks ugly these days….
You speak truth there. Disabled until they get back online.
hi brian, would you mind if i’d offer your plugin for download on my blog? I’ve received a lot of positive feedback on my german article. So i would like to offer the slightly modified version, so that people wouldn’t have to go through the plugins code (as anyone still will have to modify his index.php, single.php, page.php, style.css and so on…). I fixed the preview on the Options-Page, and would like to write a short tutorial on how to use the modified version. Would be nice if you could contact me via eMail. Maybe you like to host this alternate version on your site?, maybe i’m too bold? (as i dont have php coding skills close to what i read in the plugins-source…) My idea is to call it Revised Image Headlines v2.7 – other suggestions? Let me know what you think. Would be a pleasure coming to meet with a german translation of your documentation, if wanted…
erik,
I say go for it! Your changes are compelling and I’m sure the German speaking public would appreciate it. As long as you attribute my version as I did Joel’s version in the code and perhaps point a link my way I’d have no problem with it. Let me know when your article is done and I will post a link to your version for people that might want to implement it your way. In fact, if you’d like to provide a little paragraph in German so that I can direct any German speakers to your article so they might have a better understanding, I’ll include that text in the post as well.
Hi,
I’ve just run across a weird problem with the plugin. In a particular place on my site, I use the plugin thusly – ImageHeadlinerender(‘this blog’, ‘fontsize=13&font_color=#000′);
The problem is with the image that are generated. The png appears to have some (2px?) padding on the right after the text. See http://screamingtty.net/wp-content/image-headlines/cache/190d5dcd7680ecb63dbb760d0f4eb83e.png for an example.
Do you know of this problem? Or am I missing something?
/vinod
Sorry. Make that http://screamingtty.net/wp-content/image-headlines/cache/sample.png
Make sure there is no spaces after the text you are using. And I would try using another font, just to see if it is the font you are using.
Actually it’s by design. Some fonts don’t have their hints set quite correctly, so PHP has a hard time determining an accurate bounding box. So I added two pixels of fudge on the right to help cover those cases. I didn’t worry about a couple of possible additional extra pixels to the right of the image as most people left-justify.
If you want to get rid of it, look for the following line in the plugin:
$width = $current_settings['left_padding'] + $horizontal_shadow_spacing + ( max($bbox[0],$bbox[2],$bbox[4],$bbox[6]) - min($bbox[0],$bbox[2],$bbox[4],$bbox[6]) ) + 2;and simply remove the
+ 2at the end. You’ll have to clear the image cache — or change your settings — in order to see the change.Thanks for the info. I worked around it with some CSS.
Hi! Installation worked fine. My Problem: Whatever i change under plugins -> headlines, everytime it switches back to the default settings. So i can not change the default color, default size and so on. It just stays untouched. What am i doing wrong ?
Hi! No Matter what i change in the plugin options – it always switches back to the default settings… red text,white background.. whats wrong?
…probably been asked but is there a way to get this to work on your blog title? my approach was to throw -image- in wp_title(”)
Mike, that is not how it is used for the title. Read the plugin page and ColdForged shows you how to use it when not being used as a title.
Thanks Ensellitis-you made me realize all I had to do was replace the bloginfo function with the call tag for the plugin and it worked like a charm! For some reason that one didn’t dawn on me until I read your reply…
Hi there. I’m back. I’ve been succesfully using this plugin for about two or three weeks now, and so far there had not been any problems except for today. I made a new entry, and all of the sudden, it said this: for better or for worseAugust 5, 2005
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: imagettfbbox() in /home/krisanda/public_html/wp-content/plugins/image-headlines.php on line 849
I am no programmer, but I opened up the plugin and looked for line 849, and the thing is, I have not changed the plug-in at all. At first, I thought it might have been my template… so I changed my template… and it still says the same error. Could ‘ya help me out?
Please see this comment. Essentially your web host recompiled PHP under your nose and left out needed support.
Thanks for the awesome plugin. This is by far one of the coolest WP plugins I’ve used. You can see it in action here.
Thanks for this fabulous plug-in… It really makes my blog look more polished! XOXOX
Yes it does… love the design! You’re right, the titles truly add to it. Nice work.
Hi there, after changing my webhoster, i can’t use your great plug-in any more. First I had the error-message that my “image-headlines”-folder is not writable. When I CHMOD my “image-headlines”-folder to #777, the options-menu only loads until the line “This is a preview of your current settings. Save your settings to update the preview”, while in the front-end my whole website is down. Can you help me? GDlib and FreeType is installed. Or is there something missing? Maybe you can take a look at my http://www.gunnart.de/info.php
Looks like they have a typo in the PHP configuration.
--with--freetype-dir=/usr/include/freetype2/freetypeshould be
--with-freetype-dir=/usr/include/freetype2/freetypeIf that doesn’t help, I can only suggest to make sure you have the latest version of the plugin and, if all else fails, disable it
.
Thank you very much. I’ve just looked at info.php’s of other sites where your plugin works. And there’s always just ONE instead of TWO “-” after “with”. Now let’s see what happens if my hoster applys the suggested changes.
First off, I love the plugin.
My question is, and I apologize if I’m dumb and have overlooked this already, how do you get rid of the border around the image? More specifically, WHERE do I look to turn that off?
Thanks!
There is a border around the image in my headline images. How do I get rid of it? I checked my CSS and there’s nothing there. I checked the plugin source code but have no clue what to even look for.
It’s not a link border as the link itself is just fine (no border)
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
My webhoster has recompiled PHP today – and it still does not work… Do you think I’ll have to look for some further information about FreeType to solve the problem?
Please see this comment.
Your PHP info still seems to reports TTF linkage in the GD library instead of Freetype support like mine shows. I wonder whether they’re pointing at the wrong place for the directory in that directive (e.g.
/usr/include/freetype2/freetype). Mine and all others I’ve seen point into alibdirectory, not aninclude.Other than that, I have no further suggestions. This is definitely a host configuration error, though.
I’ve used your fabulistic plugin on my site. Not only does it generate the post headlines, but I’ve used it to generate the names of the commenters too.
Thanks for the hard work you’ve obviously put in to this plugin. Good job.
Ermm… Where’s the download. Seems to be missing.
Look in the “Install” section on this this page.
Just implemented your marvelous plugin at the Institute. Looks to be working just fine; I hope to use it for more than headlines presently. Thanks for this gem!
Hi, your plugin it’s excellent. I’ve already install it in a blog, but when I try to put it in other one that i’m doing appears this error:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: imagettfbbox() in /home/rodrigoc/public_html/wp-content/plugins/image-headlines.php on line 849
what happens?
Thanx… Gracias, te pasaste compadre…
Please see this comment.
I’m playing around with your plugin – it shows up fine in the admin interface, but not on the site – i.e. I see the Brown fox jumping over the lazy whatever, but the headlines are still plain text? What’s going on?
Please see this comment.
Oh yes, thank you, that did the trick!
(You might want to be a little more specific on this in the install instructions)
Installed like a snap, no issues and works great.. Thank you!
I am wondering if this plugin is compatible with the Elvgren template I am using… I have followed the instructions and checked it over and over, and everything that should be happening in my admin panel is happening. I have added the ‘the_title’ addition to my main template exactly where you specified, and I am still getting no change to my titles. do I need to tweak the stylesheet?
I am so close, I can taste it
First, like this guy, it looks like you changed the wrong
the_title()call. Second, when I look at the page source for your site, I can see the following error in that title: “Error: The server is missing the specified font.” Therefore, I would double-check that you have the font in the required installation directory.The plugin looks like just what I need. Now, if my other plugins would only play well with it… I use Pictpress as my image handler. It appears Image Headlines is picking up some of PictPress’s behavior for image thumbnails. Is There any way to touch up the CSS of IH2.6 to avoid this? I’m no pro at CSS or PHP, and a few hours of trying to hack around the problem got me nowhere. Any help would be greatly appreciated. See the problem at:
http://www.trekball.com/Traveblog2/WordPress/
BTW, assuming I have not fixed them by the time you click, the misaligned thumbnails are due to another problem. I probably won’t fix ‘em. It’s 4 AM in Taipei, and I’m headed to bed…
Ah yes, another case of the border thing. Add this to your CSS.
[code lang="css"]h1 a img { border: none; }[/code]
Thanks for the quick reply! I missed your earlier posts about this by mispelling border with an erroneous ‘e’. Hard to make things idiot-proof, eh? Anyway, I wasn’t able to put your kind reply to much use…
Question 1: Which CSS? Where? My Stylesheet? WordPress’s Main Template? Elsewhere? Do I need to enclose it in <>? I tried a lot of the above without much luck, but I am really just at the dabbling stage with this CSS thing.
Question 2: Your previous answer may have addressed this, but one more effect is bleeding over from pictpress. When I put my mouse over any image link it gets a yellow background. Any tips on fixing this?
Thanks again for your help. Without sage advice like yours we, the grasshoppers at your knee, might never get a chance to get our feet wet.
Yup, your stylesheet. Generally at the bottom of it would work best as that way it will override any previous
imgor other relevant declarations.It’s simply obeying your overall
a:hoverdeclaration. So override it for this case like so (insert in the stylesheet at the bottom like the other one I gave you).[code lang="css"]h1 a:hover { background: none; } [/code]
Don’t know about sage advice, but you’re welcome
.
Not sure why it was showing the font file was in a different folder, maybe I had played around with in frustration, it seems to be in the right folder now, I am seeing the font displayed in the preview section.
But still having problems placing the the_title addition. I truly cannot see my error, and I apologize for this, but this is my code:
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title('-image-'); ?>" ><?php the_title('',''); ?></a>and still the font is not displaying. I trie