Dec 29
Default Image When Image Does Not Exist
Here’s a problem I came to recently. I developing a site in PHP & using Smarty Templating. I wanted to display thumbnail images for property listings. If the listing didn’t have a thumbnail, I wanted to display a generic image of a house and message that the image was not available.
Among other ideas, the following options came to mind:
- With PHP, check to see if the thumbnail existed before displaying it, if it did not, display the generic image.
- Write a Smarty function to check if file exists.
- Create a new field in the database to store the thumbnail name.
- Use PHP code in the smarty template.
For reasons I won’t go into, none of these were GOOD solutions. I wanted to specify a name like “6_thumb.png” and if it didn’t exist, display “_thumb.png”
The only way I could think of do this with was to somehow make use of Apache. So this was the simple but effective solution I came up with, with the help of a friend.
I created an .htaccess file with the following line of code:
ErrorDocument 404 /404.php
I then created a file named 404.php with this code snippet:
if (preg_match("/[0-9]*_thumb\.png/”, $_SERVER[REQUEST_URI])) {
header(”Location: /house_images/_thumb.png”);
exit;
}
It worked like a charm!
