Newbie Needs to change pictures in older website gallery

A friend of mine has a website created about 8 years ago. The MODx version is 0.9.2.1 and the guy who did the work for him has long since left town. The pictures in the gallery haven't been changed for 6 years and obviously he wants to update them. As far as I can tell, they're located at: http://xxxxxxxxx.com/assets/images/gallery4.jpg

When I try to get into the images, ( http://xxxxxxxxx.com/assets/images
I get

Unauthorized access
You're not allowed to access file folder
Can anyone please help an old..old...programmer?

Wow, that's a truly antique version of MODX.

I think the simplest approach would be to download the picture files in cPanel's file manager or with FTP and figure out which picture is which locally. Then replace them with new files with exactly the same names and upload them to the web site via cPanel or FTP.

BobRay,
Thanks for your response but like I said, I'm a real newbee. I looked at cPanel and that stuff looks kinda "greek" to me also. I've got the password to get into the dashboard but where do I go from there? Still looking for some step by step by step help.

well, from the manager you would go to the folder (likely in Files/Media/Assets, at least in a newer version of Modx) where the files are, and then given the circumstances you may just want to get those image names and then give the new images the same names, and replace the old with the new in that same folder. Download all, check em out, and then up and replace the old files with the new ones. Its not like windows with filename.exe and filename(1).exe, it will ask you, do you want to replace?

Somewhere there is a link which is pointing to that folder and looking for that file name. It doesn't care what the file is, specifically, only file name and folder.

Bob's basic thinking is, rather than digging into where the link is and how it was created, you just replace the actual image files.

HTH, feel free to ask more. We were all newbies once.

That is a very old version of evolution, the best advice I can give at this point is to upgrade to the newest version ( 1.0.15 ). Due to massive amounts of security fixes and improvements it may take you a little time but well worth the effort.

Thanks for your help but I don't have those options. Attached is the print screen from the home page. Any more help?

Ok, you are going to look for the files, the image files that you want to change, right? If your goal here is different than that, pls say so.

Basically you are looking for a tree structure like you have, but these are the pages of the site, not the tree structure of the underlying files like images and other stuff. I can see the file names from the site, kids-swimming.jpg and buck_at_lake.jpg. And I can see the real path to the images is sitename.com/assets/images.

This is a super old version so I am not sure where they might be. Check "Content" and "Resources", you are looking for a folder with a bunch of image files in it, they will probably all be together, hopefully in a folder "Assets". "Resources" is probably your best bet, hopefully its resources/assets/images

Have a look and pls report back if you would. Very cool to see a very old Modx installation, long before I got into the game. ;-)

It looks to me like all your images are either in the /assets/images directory, or the images/ directory. You can see the location by hovering over an image in your browser, right-clicking on the image, selecting "Copy image location", then going to a text editor and pasting the location (that's how I got the image link below).

http://swamph2o.com/assets/images/kids-swimming.jpg

I suspect that the site is old enough that those are the real locations. Lucky for you, the images have meaningful names.

I'm guessing here, but I think if you go to Resources -> Manage Files and click to expand the images and assets/images folders, you may see your image files. If that version of MODX has an upload option in the Files section, you may be able to upload new versions of the files right there.

If not, go into cPanel's File Manager, look under the public_html folder for the images and assets/images folders. If you find your image files there, you can upload new ones using the upload button at the top of the File Manager screen.

To address your "unauthorized access" question, all that means is that the web server is configured to not allow people to look at a list of the files in a given folder from their browser. This is referred to as "directory indexing". Any live web server should be configured with directory indexing disabled as a security measure.

The MODX file manager (if I recall correctly, that would be under the main Resources menu) uses a script to provide a list of directories and files in the website and provides functions for managing the files. You can delete, upload and rename files from there.

A bit of advice. Those old versions of MODX kept all kinds of statistics about visitors, which will lead to really big database tables where that data is kept. That's why the feature was removed at some point. I don't remember if the "Visitor stats" menu item includes a button for clearing that listing.

Old versions of MODX are vulnerable to some nasty hacks, turning a site into spam and malware pushers. Personally I simply refuse to work with any site where I cannot keep it updated to keep it secure.

Well, I tried to do the resources thing and attached find the directory. It looks like an upload feature is not allowed and is an invalid path. Any more ideas or should he start from complete scratch?
Thanks