Pixelpost

Frontpage Related Questions

I am getting a blank page when calling my Photoblog. What happened?
I posted an image and can see it in my admin images list but it is not shown in the front page
I am using a language containing special characters but they are not displayed correctly
How can I get rid of the "Thank you" page shown to visitors after a comment has been posted?
I installed Pixelpost but cannot open the main page, I get 404 Page not Found - error

Resolving the Blank Page Issue

If you see a blank page without showing anything on the start page it is most likely that you did some changes in the core code of Pixelpost. It can be also an addon which is not compatible to your version of Pixelpost. If you are logged in as administrator, you can add "?errors" into the address field of your browser window and relaod the page (only Pixelpost > v1.6!). Usually you will now be confronted with an error message which explains the behaviour.
If a third party addon file is the reason, turn it off and ask the addon author for an update.
If a Pixelpost core file or a Pixelpost addon file was the baddy, download a clean Pixelpost installation package from http://www.pixelpost.org/releases/pixelpost_v1.7.0.zip and replace the corrupted files.

Explanation:

PHP and MySQL error messages are hidden by Pixelpost by default. But sometimes it may be helpful to see them when you are working on an Addon code for example.
You can either use the "?errors" or "?errorsall" as described above where "?errors" gives error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE) and "?errorsall" gives error_reporting(E_ALL).
If you are working on redirection pages this may not work for you, so go into the index.php of Pixelpost and change the error_reporting(0) in line 45 to error_reporting(E_ALL).
Don't forget to set that back again when you are finished! Otherwise your visitors might well be provided with a bunch of ugly warnings and notices.

The Future Post Secret

If you see an image with thumbnail within your Images List in the Administrator Panel but it is not displayed as the newest photo in your blog, it is most probably posted on a future date. Check this in the Edit Image Page!

If you post a photo, you can set the date to the future. t This will be hidden to the public until the posting date and time. Only when logged in as Administrator you can see this future image.
You can use this feature for two things:

Create draft postings
Post a photo and see how it looks like in your blog before showing it to the public. To publish it, just set it to the actual date and time or earlier
Create queue postings
Post a series of photo on dedicated days. They will be published at the day you set. This is great for updating your Photoblog even if you are on holiday.
Tip: You can use the setting "post one day after the last entry" in your New Image page to set a daily scheme automatically.

UTF-8, German Umlauts and other strange chars

If there are strange chars in your Pixelpost front pages there can be several reasons. Please perform the following actions one by one:

Change the encoding of the page in your browser, set it to UTF-8.
- If that doesn't change anything you have a format issue in your files:
  If you made changes to any files in your Pixelpost installation, especially the language files, be sure that you always save them as Unicode.
  If you make changes to php files (Addons or core files) be sure to save them as Unicode without BOM.
  You should replace special characters in your template files by their HTML entities or save them as Unicode.
- If everything is ok now, that means that the file format is correct but the encoding of the page is not done in UTF-8 automatically as it is meant to be.
  Unfortunately your browser encoding setting is lost again as soon as you leave this page, so we have to tell the browser always to use the UTF-8 encoding for Pixelpost.
You should control the META tags in your front pages now. On top of each template file there should be this line within the HTML head (between <HEAD> and </HEAD>):
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
If it is not, please place it there.
If everything is in place and the special chars are still looking weird most probably your server sends a default charset encoding to the browser and overrules the META tag.
You can set this server information to UTF-8 with a little .htaccess file. Copy these lines:
```
AddDefaultCharSet utf-8
AddCharSet utf-8 .shtml .htm .html .php
```
and save it as .htaccess. Upload the file into the root directory (where index.php is stored).
If this is not working too you have to ask your hosting provider to change the default encoding for you.

Redirecting to the last viewed photo without "Thank You" page

Open the template page where the comment form is in and add this line between the <form> and </form> tags: <input type="hidden" name="withthankyou" value="no" />

404 Page not found error when calling the main page

When you have installed Pixelpost successfully, and you can log in in the admin section, but the main page, the start page of your Pixelpost cannot be loaded, brings the error: 404 page not found instead, then check the following:

test if you can open one of the other pages of Pixelpost, for example the archive:
http://www.yourdomain.com/pixelpost/index.php?x=browse
if so, try to call the main page directly:
http://www.yourdomain.com/pixelpost/index.php
if it is possible to call the index.php, than you know that everything is correctly installed.

Only one thing is missing: your server is not set to accept a file "index.php" as default page. Some servers accept only the following filetypes: index.html, index.htm or/and index.shtml
Is this the case, you should ask your hoster to add index.php to the default index-pages and your problem will be solved!

Authentic Photoblog Flavour

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