Since my site is a form of gig-photo-gallery site, I needed to add a photo gallery extension to my Joomla package. I searched around for fancy extensions with good reviews and an easy installation procedure. I finally found Phoca Gallery with a SlideShow feature. Check out the following link for more info:
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/photos-&-images/photo-gallery/3150/details
It installed and worked like a marvel on my local site but problems, worthy of a blog post, arose when I tried installing in the remote server. This should be a problem experienced by anyone trying to add an extension to a remote Joomla site without following a few important steps that I’ll highlight below.
Installation issues
With a clean install, upon trying to install any additional extensions, you’ll be slapped with this error:
JFolder::create: Infinite loop detected
So I googled around and found the following link with similar complaints in the Joomla forum:
http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=429&t=266930
Going through it you’ll find a mix of solutions to the problem and you might be confused as to which one relates to you and which method to try first.
In summary, the issue has to do with access to the temporary (\tpm) and logging (\log) directories. By default, all the files that you upload on a remote server are given read-only permission… even to you the administrator. So to install components you need to make sure that Joomla knows where these directories are located and ensure that they have write access. Specifying the location of these files is done in your configuration.php file. The location of these files varies with different server packages and you can find some of the solutions to these problems in the link above. I’m trying to avoid a tedious blog post here. Mail me if you have any issues and you’re using sadomian.co.za services.
Giving write access to the directories can be done via FTP, as you would do with your Windows Explorer (apologies to all Open Source pioneers). Some people claim that FTP applications don’t allow you to do this and recommend using CPanel directly. I used CuteFTP and my permission changes were not ignored. The trick was to go down to each relevant file and change security permissions from 775 or 755 to 777… do this from the bottom->up in the directory structure. When you make these changes from the top->down in the directory structure then your changes WILL be ignored.
This solves half the problem, but should work for extensions that don’t access other folders besides your tmp and log folder. I’m yet to find such an extension but it seems other people have cracked it this way.
Extension specific folder access
The next thing to do is to find out what folders and files your extension will use for functionality, and give public write access to these folders as explained earlier. Otherwise you could end up with errors like the picture included in this post. (Unable to write entry)
In my case it was the pictures (/images) and relevant components folders since I was using Phoca-Gallery. Mail me for specifics… I can’t put that up for fear of getting my site hacked.
After all the relevant write access changes, it was smooth sailing… I’ll highlight issues experienced while uploading pictures in my next post.
Happy Configuring!
PS: I spent 2 nights trying to get this going… I’m a Telecommunications Engineer by day.
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