Error messages
An error message not listed below.
This is likely an error message triggered by the image processing library while it was generating preview images or thumbnails. Try to switch the image processing library in the administration back-end, e.g. choose Graphics Draw (GD) if default or ImageMagick was selected previously.
Unable to get the jQuery library from the following content delivery network (CDN) sources.
This warning message is shown immediately after the installation of sigplus has finished when you server functionality is limited by the administrator – usually for security reasons – and cannot initiate download requests from PHP/Joomla code. What sigplus has attempted was to connect to a CDN source, download the file jquery.js and save it to your server but it has been unsuccessful.
If you have a site that is available from the internet and you do not plan to use the value local copy for the advanced configuration setting AJAX library source, you can safely ignore this message. Most users do not need to pay any attention to the warning as the default value for AJAX library source is not local copy.
However, if you would like to set local copy as the jQuery library source, either because your site is for an intranet or you employ site optimization tools that make this necessary, you must download jQuery manually and copy it to /plugins/content/sigplus/js/jquery.js.
Text files are assumed to have UTF-8 character encoding but file uses a different encoding.
The labels.txt file used to attach captions to individual images contains international characters outside the ASCII character set. You should either remove these characters (typically accented characters or certain punctuation characters) or save your file in UTF-8 encoding. In the open-source editor Notepad++ for Windows, for instance, this can be done by opening the menu Encoding and selecting Convert to UTF-8 without BOM.
Image folder folder specified in the administration back-end does not exist or is inaccessible.
The folder specified on the module back-end configuration settings page that sigplus draws images to display from does not exist in the file system or sigplus has insufficient permissions to get a listing of files in this folder. Make sure the folder is valid and is accessible to Joomla, which typically means UNIX permissions 755.
Image folder folder is expected to be a path relative to the image base folder specified in the administration back-end.
The image (gallery) folder is the folder you specify with the {gallery}folder{/gallery} activation tag. An example is birds, which is set with {gallery}birds{/gallery}. The image base folder is the folder you specify in the administration back-end as a plug-in configuration option. An example is images/stories, which corresponds to the usual article image folder of a Joomla 1.5 installation. When looking for images to display, sigplus concatenates these two to get the folder where the images are and prefixes it with the Joomla root folder. In our example, this could mean the absolute file system path /home/username/www/images/stories/birds. The folder has to exist and be accessible to Joomla.
Example (UNIX)
| Absolute path to your Joomla root folder | /home/username/www |
| Image base folder you set in the administration back-end | images/stories |
| Activation tag you use inside the text of an article to call sigplus | {gallery}myphotos/birds{/gallery} |
| Absolute path to folder where sigplus looks for images | /home/username/www/images/stories/myphotos/birds |
Example (Windows)
| Absolute path to your Joomla root folder | D:\inetpub\wwwroot\joomla |
| Image base folder you set in the administration back-end | images/stories |
| Activation tag you use inside the text of an article to call sigplus | {gallery}myphotos/birds{/gallery} |
| Absolute path to folder where sigplus looks for images | D:\inetpub\wwwroot\joomla\images\stories\myphotos\birds |
Image base folder folder specified in the administration back-end is expected to be a relative path w.r.t. the Joomla root.
The image base folder is the folder you specify in the administration back-end as a plug-in configuration option, which is prefixed with the Joomla root folder to get the actual absolute file system folder. It cannot contain .. (parent folder) to walk outside the Joomla root folder. A valid base folder could be images (or images/stories), which is a standard folder for a Joomla 1.6 (respectively, Joomla 1.5) installation.
Thumb folder folder specified in the administration back-end is expected to be a relative path w.r.t. the image folder.
The thumb folder is created either in the directory where the images sigplus displays are (if Use cache for generated images is not set in the administration back-end) or in the Joomla cache directory (if Use cache for generated images is set). No .. is allowed to walk up in the directory hierarchy.
Preview image folder folder specified in the administration back-end is expected to be a relative path w.r.t. the image folder.
See the explanation above.
Folder folder specified for high-resolution image versions in the administration back-end is expected to be a relative path w.r.t. the image folder, or should be left empty.
See the explanation above.
Thumb folder and preview image folder cannot be both set to folder.
Since the preview images and the thumbnail images use the same file name as the original image, they have to be put into separate directories (if Use cache for generated images is not set in the administration back-end) so that they do not overwrite one another.
Insufficient file system permissions to access the image base folder folder, or the folder does not exist.
The image base folder is the folder you specify in the administration back-end as a plug-in configuration option, which is prefixed with the Joomla root folder to get the actual absolute file system folder. An example for base folder could be images/stories, which corresponds to the usual article image folder of a Joomla 1.5 installation. Assuming your Joomla root folder has the path /home/username/www, this could, in turn, map to an absolute file system path /home/username/www/images/stories, which has to exist and be accessible to Joomla.
Insufficient file system permissions to create the folder folder.
sigplus was trying to create a subfolder for preview images or thumbnails but it does not have sufficient rights so that this can be performed.
The Graphics Draw (gd) or ImageMagick (imagick) image processing library has to be enabled in the PHP configuration to generate thumbnails.
Graphics Draw (gd) and ImageMagick (imagick) are PHP extensions for image processing sigplus uses to generate preview images and thumbnails. If none of these are available, you will not be able to have preview images and thumbnail automatically generated. Contact your server administrator on how to have one of these libraries enabled.
Insufficient memory to carry out the requested operation on file, number bytes required, number bytes available.
When generating preview images and thumbnails, the original image has to fit into the memory available on the server. Most image formats used on the web are compressed images (e.g. GIF, JPEG or PNG images), which have to be decompressed before they could be processed. If Joomla is not allocated enough server-side memory to store the actual image, image generation fails.
Do not be deceived by raw file size when judging the amount of memory required to have a GIF, JPEG or PNG image re-scaled on the server. These image formats use efficient compression schemes that can reduce the file size to a fraction of the true image size (width × height × color depth). In order for sigplus to re-scale an image, however, it has to perform a decompression, and sufficient memory must be available to store each pixel of the decompressed image.
As a solution to eliminate the error message, you are recommended either to increase server-side memory, or resize your images before you upload them to the image gallery folder. Usually, images intended for the web rarely need a resolution multiple times the size of a regular display, which a normal digital camera would take.
Fatal error: Maximum execution time of x seconds exceeded.
This error message is generated by PHP, it may only be available in the server log.
Even while you copy the original images to the server, medium- and small-size preview and thumbnail images are generated by sigplus using one of the image processing libraries GD or ImageMagick. Generating such images is a resource- and time-intensive operation, especially if the galleries involved comprise of many images. If the time required to generate all images exceeds the time allocated to Joomla/PHP in the server configuration (typically 30 seconds or less), the script is forcefully terminated with an error message, and a completely blank screen may be returned.
Fortunately, generating preview and thumbnail images is a one-time cost, which is incurred only when the gallery is displayed for the first time (or for new images when they are added to the gallery): once images have been generated, they are cached for future re-use, and the page will display to visitors in much less time that it took to be displayed initially. Furthermore, if interrupted while images are being generated, specifically by a timeout condition, sigplus is able to resume at the point where the interruption took place, which means a couple of page refreshes should solve the issue. Once the gallery appears in its full glory, visitors will not encounter the timeout message as the images are then retrieved from the image cache. The number of refreshes required depends on many factors including the exact number of images in the gallery, the hard disk and processor speed of the server, and most importantly, the PHP configuration option max_execution_time.