We’re using Timthumb on our WordPress blog to display post thumbnails in the homepage. The fact is that, even if the ALLOW_EXTERNAL options is set to TRUE, we have some problems to get it working.
As you can see, this image is showing with no problems:
http://www.ideageek.it/wp-content/themes/ideageek/timthumb.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.ideageek.it%2Fuploads%2F2011%2F08%2Fwindows_explorer-e1314218545653.gif&w=160&h=120&zc=1
While this one, hosted on the same identical server (img.ideageek.it) is not showing correctly.
http://www.ideageek.it/wp-content/themes/ideageek/timthumb.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.ideageek.it%2Fuploads%2F2011%2F08%2Fmyp2p-e1314255308699.jpg&w=160&h=120&zc=1
The error given, as you can see, is the “remote host “img.ideageek.it” not allowed” one, though any of other external hosts work.
Since it’s where we use to store images, the img.ideageek.it domain has always been in the allowed domains list with the ALLOW_EXTERNAL option set to false, but since this problem showed up, I set the ALLOW_EXTERNAL to true without caring too much for security. Unfortunately, even after two days of waiting due to the cache, nothing has really changed.
I know I’m using an old version of timthumb, but I’d actually prefer not to update because I’m afraid of breaking the whole theme.
Hope you can help 🙂
See no.2 in this troubleshooting article
http://www.elegantthemes.com/troubleshooting-timthumb.html
or use workaround from here (editing domain whitelist):
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-use-timthumb-with-external-image-link