How To Make TimThumb Play Nicely With TanTan’s WordPress S3 Plugin

I’m loving the Woo theme for this blog, and especially love that they integrated the cool TimThumb script to automatically resize thumbnails for the main page. But everything stopped working when I added TanTan’s WordPress-S3 plugin to store my images on Amazon’s servers. Luckily, I found a fix!

The first step was upgrading Woo’s version of TimThumb.php. I downloaded the latest version from Google Code and replaced the thumb.php file in the theme directory (under wp-content/themes).

Next, I had to add Amazon S3 to the “allowedSites” array in thumb.php. I added the following line:

 's3-1-w.amazonaws.com',

I also had to tell CURL to allow the SSL connection by adding the following line under “$ch = curl_init ($src)”, around line 606:

 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);

Then we need two subdirectories, temp and cache, in the same directory as the plugin. Make sure both are writable with an old “chmod 777”. I found that Woo automatically created the “cache”, but the “temp” was AWOL.

That’s it! Now that I did this mod, TimThumb and WordPress-S3 are playing nicely and all is right with the world. The image above (my own photo) was uploaded and thumbnailed automatically!