• Theme Playground: themeplayground.com
• My Lost blog: lostbits.ryanimel.com
• Watch: awesome infographic video: vimeo.com/2030361
• Listen: Ben Kweller “On My Way”
• Read: thoughts on Macheist: log.scifihifi.com/post/89882957/macheist

Now, first a little bit more detail might be necessary. The exact error I ran into was this:

Site error: the file (filename) requires the ionCube PHP Loader ioncube_loader_lin_5.2.so to be installed by the site administrator.

(If anyone cares, this happened when installing a Plugin called WP-Member to a blog I run called Frontending. More on the relevancy of adding in that Plugin before long .)

Nobody likes errors. When I saw this I did what any able minded person of the modern world would do. I Google’d it. Odds are that you might have discovered this very post by running a search like I did.

Walking through the solution

It should be said, although the post title says so, that this solution is only likely to work when you are hosted by Bluehost. As I am, this is how I figured it out.

So what is ionCube? Apparently it’s a PHP encoder of some sort, that certain applications use in order to run. In my research I was able to see a couple of examples, one where a Joomla plugin was the culprit, in other cases a WordPress Plugin called Fedafi. Basically the host is only set up with the basics of ionCube, and we need to supplement it. 

Open up your site in an FTP client and browse to the topmost level. This is the level that lists public_html as a folder. You should see a folder called ioncube. Crack that sucker open and you should see two files (at least), ioncube_loader_lin_ts.so and ioncube_loader_lin.so. You probably won’t see the ioncube_loader_lin_5.2.so file mentioned in the error message. That makes sense, right?

Run over to the ionCube site and grab the appropriate zip full of the loader you need. Now, in order to determine which of the files you should download, you’ll need to know your server’s OS and architecture. You can find this located in your Bluehost Cpanel along the left sidebar. Mine is running on Linux (OS) and x86_64 (architecture). Find your own and grab the corresponding zip file from the ionCube loaders page.

Unzip and throw the two files with 5.2 at the end into your site’s ioncube folder, the one we identified a minute ago. Now we should be good, right? Well, almost.

Traversing php.ini

Odds are that you’ve heard of php.ini at one point or another, most likely when editing it (or at times creating it) in order to increase the size of files you can upload to your site. Before stepping into this dunghole of a problem myself, I had only ever modified php.ini in order to do that. Now, it’s time for a bit more of an understanding of how php.ini works in cooperation with Bluehost’s Cpanel.

In your Bluehost Cpanel, jump into PHP Config. I usually just run a find/text search on the page to see where it’s located. You should see three options, like in the image below:

First, pay attention to the first three options regarding the PHP you are running.

You can see that, in my case, I’m now running PHP5 with FastCGI. There is a lot having to do with this decision that I won’t cover here, but one reason related to the issue at hand is that we want to be able to only have to deal with one instance of php.ini, and not copy it ourselves into every directory that will be using it. That would just be a pain in the ass. (Note that choosing FastCGI is not necessary for this to work, but it makes it a bit less painful, I think.)

Assuming that you don’t have any major modifications done to your php.ini file, go ahead and hit the “Install php.ini Master File” button, after selecting IonCube from the options above it. Keep in mind that if you do have any worthwhile modifications done to php.ini, you can just copy them and paste them into your new php.ini file when it’s there.

Take a look into your public_html folder. There should now be a php.ini.default file. Kill the file ending so it is just php.ini. Now download it and open it up so that we can make the modification we need to.

Toward the bottom of your php.ini file you should see the references to the basic ionCube loaders. It should look something like this:

Note that the path referencing the ioncube files may be slightly different for you.

At line 118 and 119, we see the references to the two files that were originally in use at our site. But we want to add two more, two references to the two 5.2 files that we added.

The key here is to maintain the nomenclature of line 118, but duplicate it for the two new files. So we’re going to add two lines that look like this: zend_extension=/home/sitename/ioncube/filename. We’re also going to add them directly after the [Zend] at line 1123.

Use this image as a reference:

Again, note that the path to the two files you add will need to be adjusted from what's displayed here.

Once you have those two lines (in the above, the lines added to 1124 and 1125) in your php.ini file, save that puppy.

Given a minute or two for your cache to clear (force a reload if necessary) you should be good to go with whatever problem you’re facing. In my case, I was immediately able to successfully activate WP-Member. So I’m a happy camper.

It should be mentioned that I found a good deal of help with this issue at these following sites.

• The FAQ page I started with regarding this error, at WP-Member’s support site
• This thread at the Bluehost forums with a couple of people trying to figure this problem out

I appreciate their help, and only put this together so that there is one consistent tutorial on the issue. Hope it helps someone!

With WordPress I was able to easily build around a dynamic set of information. This was completely new to me. It was fun. But aside from these simple things I can’t claim any sort of noble reason for choosing WordPress.

Now I know more about why one would want to use WordPress. Not only is it simple yet powerful, but it is built on the beautiful foundation that is open source. WordPress is free, self hosted, and entirely customizable. I would also argue it is worthwhile for what it teaches you about PHP.

With the latest release of WordPress 2.5, a fairly impressive gallery system now comes built into the default WordPress install, complete with template tags. Matt Mullenweg has been the best example so far of this feature in action. He has uploaded thousands of photos up to this point (right Matt?) and this tells me the feature is fairly robust and can handle some heavy use.

I’m drawn to this new feature, and to the possibilities I see coming out of it in the future.

But right now I’m on Flickr.

At the time I chose Flickr for my photos, I really did believe (and still do) that the choice I made at the time was correct. Then. My options were Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, or nothing at all, really. Flickr was new, exciting, and social. Why wouldn’t I want to use it? Why wouldn’t anyone?

Now, a year and one half after starting my Flickr account (as well as coaxing others to join and start their own) I am reneging on my decision. I have been influenced, albeit late in the game, by some great open source literature.

Open source is free. More importantly, it means it can never be taken away.

Flickr, my current photo repository, is $24 per year. If Yahoo pulled the plug, the service would disappear.

Open source—more specifically, WordPress—is self hosted. I get to keep it on my server and maintain it myself.

Flickr is Yahoo’s. I can touch, but only in the way they allow.

Open source platforms can’t die.

Flickr could die.

I’m not against Flickr. I’m not even against paid photo hosting services in general. I know that these services provide very valuable things—social interaction, sharing, and printing directly from viewing screens, for example.

At the same time, with what is being pushed forward in BuddyPress at the moment (check out the site and sign up for the mailing list to get some of the inside scoop) I see these sorts of social interactions happening in an even better way than what is possible with Flickr. An open landscape sounds really nice.

I’ll be slowly moving over photos from Flickr to my personal WordPress blog (that’s here). Note that this has nothing at all to do with the recent decision over at Flickr to begin accepting video clips. Purely inconsequential.

Now I’m just excited to move forward and get my “media library” back under my full control.