Images don't show up

Question

I've just set up a new multisite installation. Everything works as I'd except that images don't show up on any of the sub-sites.

Any idea why the images don't show up?

I'm running Wordpress 3.1.1 on IIS6 in a shared Windows server (hosted by Arvixe.com). The secondary sites are in sub-directories rather than sub-domains. The images for the main site work, as does the header image, but the images in sub-sites don't appear.

I know that the images are uploading properly as they appear in the blogs.dir folder on the server. They also show up if I navigate them like this:

http://www.example.com/test/wp-content/blogs.dir/5/files/2011/04/LazyDog.jpg

However, they don't work when I navigate to them like this:

http://www.kramii.com/test/files/2011/04/LazyDog.jpg

When I try this second version in IE I get the broken image icon, whereas in Firefox I get just the filename at the top of the screen. Interestingly, when I show the page info in Firefox it shows type as "image/jpeg", which suggests to me (and I might be wrong) that the server has found the image and is attempting to send it to the browser.

My web.config looks like this:

In my settings for the site I've got:

• Site url = http://kramii.com/test/
• Home = http://kramii.com/test/ Upload
• path = http://kramii.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/5/files
• Upload URL path = http://kramii.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/5/files
• Fileupload URL = http://kramii.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/5/files

I've disabled all plugins.

One final note: someone on another site had a similar problem and someone else replied "Is your webhost using a caching mechanism or proxying your webtraffic?". Quite honestly I don't really understand what this means. How would I know? What can I do if they are?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Finally, I've got it!

Sniffing the HTTP resonses indicated that a few extra bytes were being inserted between the headers and body of the http response, resulting in bad image data.

Further investigation revealed that these characters represent a Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM).

These, in turn, were caused by a Windows editor that saved wp-config.php with a UTF-8 encoding that includes the BOM. Re-saving the wp-config file using a editor (Notepad++) that can strip the BOM resolved the problem. The only additional requirement was to flush the browser cache to clear the bad response.

I hope this helps someone else who has a similar problem. It has taken me literally hours to fins the answer, but I've learned a lot on the way.