While setting up the Comment plugin provided with WolfCMS, I ran into an issue where the captcha was not being rendered. After a little sniffing around, I began to suspect there was an issue with the gd module in my PHP installation. Running php -v (or looking in the logs) showed the following errors:
PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php/modules/gd.so' - /usr/lib/php/modules/gd.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0
PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php/modules/json.so' - /usr/lib/php/modules/json.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0The output indicated PHP was failing to load the json.so and gd.so PHP modules. The json.so issue was resolved easily after reading the following Arch news announcement:
which called for removal of the 'extension=json.so' line entirely as json had been built into PHP and thus the module was no longer required. Getting back to the main problem with gd - first course of action was to verify that the following line in my php.ini file was uncommented, and indeed it was:extension=gd.soThis issue was resolved by installing the following:
package from the extra repository. After restarting httpd the captcha on Wolf's Comment plugin began functioning correctly. I have since moved to disqus for comments, but this was a helpful exercise nonetheless.Unfortunately in the time since writing this post, the Arch linux package link has gone dead. Instead maybe try: