CMS Made Simple Forums

Fresh install of CMSMS 1.11.6 under XAMPP 1.8.1 on Windows 2008 (32-bit, not R2). Everything works perfectly from the server. But when I access the site from any remote client, I see the pages but none of the images (logo, background shades, etc). I tried several of the default styles and they all exhibit the same problem. This happens with IE7 and 8, Chrome and Firefox. Clearly the images are not being served up to remote connections. I've done no customization at all - this is straight "outta the box". Did I miss some file permissions somewhere? Why would everything look fine from the local server, but not the remote machines?

I highly doubt this is a CMSMS issue. it smells more like a problem with host name resolution, or the generation of your image tags.

I would check the source of your page.... grab the URL to one of those images, and test if you can access that image directly in your browser.

Good suggestion. From a client, I tried using the server's IP address instead of the name and got the same results. On the site, I changed to the NCleanBlue theme, then loaded the page from a client. I found that I do get 2 images: the ncleanblue\screen-1.6.jpg and the printbutton.gif. When I look at the page source, I can see refrences to both these image files. The one that don't show are the cmsms logo, version badge, magnifying glass, color shades - apparently all the ones associated with the style sheet. All of the other text-based content is dispayed correctly. I can't think of a reason all this would work locally, but not remotely. Could it be something in my Apache config?? (fwiw: on the server, I tried using "http://servername as well as "http://localhost and all pages rendered fine.)

The problem appears to be in the way the server is generating the .css files. When I look at the .css file referenced in the html I see that the url for all the images is using 'localhost' as the server name, not the actual server name. That would explain why the styles render correctly on the server (aka localhost) but not from a remote client. My question now is, how do I get CMSMS to use 'myservername' in the css instead of 'localhost'??

Yep, it's a config issue.

Make sure the root_url value in the config.php is set properly. On most hosted/properly-configured servers this is not a problem and CMSMS can calculate it properly. On windoze with xamp it may be 'calculating' (correctly I may add) that your 'root url' is "http://localhost/