Magazine template images help

[Survival Acres]

I've recently installed the latest Suffusion template (good job!!) after delaying a major upgrade for many years. My blog has several thousand posts. I'm trying to implement the magazine template.

I've created a magazine test page, currently "private" so won't bother with a link. Looks good, but has some problems.

None of my existing post images show up. Searching this forum hasn't turned up why (yet).

Looking at the source code, it appears that images are supposed to be in domain/wp-content/uploads/thumb-cache. The /thumb-cache folder does not even exist on the server.

I haven't figured out "how" to get images into that location. I've always put blog images under domain/blog/images.

Wordpress is installed under domain/blog.

I created a new post today, with an image. Shows up just fine in the non-magazine layout, http://survivalacres.com/blog but not in the magazine test page. The Header section is there, so is the Excerpt for this particular post, but no image.

The other problems on the magazine test page is Excerpts showing duplicate headings. Those posts that have images in them show a "double heading", example:

Climate Propaganda Warming Up (hyperlink)
(blank where image should be)

Climate Propaganda Warming Up (hyperlink)

All the other Excerpts seem to be fine, they don't have any images or thumbnails in them. What setting do I have wrong?

Clearly, I'm doing something wrong with how to save images, how to upload (have always simply FTP in the past to the domain/blog/image directory) and how to mark the posts as having magazine images.

I have checked Additional Options for Suffusion / Images and entered in the full image path: http://survivalacres.com/blog/images/he ... aganda.jpg
but nothing shows up in the magazine template. The source code says it's still looking in the domain/wp-content/uploads/thumb-cache for some reason.

Any help is much appreciated, I need to get this switched over asap.

[sayontan]

Just go ahead and create that folder. It will generate the thumbnails for you

[Survival Acres]

Ok, thank you. Created the folder, protections are fine. Resaved the post with image. Nothing shows up in /thumb-cache.

I'm guessing that I am overlooking a essential step -- how do image actually get placed in /thumb-cache? FTP manually?

Am I supposed to be using the Featured Image function in Posts? So far my efforts with this aren't working either.

[sayontan]

Sorry, I donkt have access to a computer for the next few hours. The images get created on the fly based on a bunch of parameters. I might need to log into your system to check

[Survival Acres]

I am still unable to get images to display in magazine headings or excerpts.

Even manually creating a thumbnail, then FTP to the specified directory thumb folder doesn't work.

Again, examining the source code generated shows some odd URL's generated. Example:
<img src="http://survivalacres.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/thumb-cache/heartland-propaganda-aa10c471e11db7975976861a3936c62f-150x90-75-nocrop.jpg"

Should be "http://survivalacres.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/thumb-cache/heartland-propaganda.jpg". This is the name of the actual image that I saved and put on the server manually.

Apparently, Suffusion (or Wordpress) appends a lot of mishmash data to the image name.

So how DOES one actually save images in a post, get them placed on the server, so that the image name doesn't get trashed?

Is there a plugin required? Or a step-by-step process to get images properly named and saved?

I've tried specifying Thumbnail and Featured image with the standard URl, but nothing shows up.

I've also verified that the image is actually on the server.
Thumb: http://survivalacres.com/blog/wp-conten ... -thumb.jpg
Featured image: http://survivalacres.com/blog/wp-conten ... aganda.jpg

[sayontan]

Sorry, I was stuck in a personal emergency all day yesterday.

This is how things work:

1. Suffusion tries to determine the right image for a post depending on your settings. It uses a bunch of things - the "Featured Image" capability that WP provides, the custom featured image field (which predates the featured image capability of WP), the custom thumbnail image field, an image in your media gallery (attached to the post), or an embedded URL. What it picks is based on a prioritization order that you set.
2. Once it has found the right image, it has to resize it. This is a hard resize (a file is created in the cache folder). In some cases such as images uploaded through the WP media upload the images are resized automatically upon upload. But for other images the resizing happens upon the first instance of fetching it on the front-end with a different size. During this process, the file created in the cache folder has a different name, augmented with the MD5 checksum of the source (otherwise you might get into file name conflicts).

Now, if for some reason the file is not being written to the cache folder, there will be issues. This isn't something I can debug without login access, but that being said, I must add that I haven't seen such issues since more than a year.