Hi. Totally new to the software and it looks pretty great except for a couple of issues. here's one.

I added the crop image v1.4.2 plugin and saw the button appear in the image utilities tab as expected. The problem is that I keep getting this error when I click the button:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function gettext() in /www/firstlightaa.org/htdocs/zenphoto/zp-core/zp-extensions/crop_image.php on line 13

I searched troubleshooting and forums but no luck on this. Any help is appreciated, because when I upload cropped images from my iPhone (via FTP), they show up in their original state uncropped. I would like to crop them in admin.

I am not a developer. I see your troubleshooting questions and most I think are easy, some that are hard but that I figured out, and a couple that are like greek to me. Basically, I need to do everything within the interface as opposed to working directly with PHP code, since I know nothing about it. For instance, I can't use the menu plugin because it says to call some code to make it appear. I'm lost with that, unless I can get some step by step.

And I'm using the default theme. Just installed a couple of days ago by my provider.

thanks!

gettext is a special PHP extension to provide translations of the static strings on the backend. This means that you don't have that extension. It however should actually not be needed as a functionless replacement is defined if not available so this error should not appear.
That is within the normal plugin description and I see no way this could happen. This should also happen on other plugins then. Does it?

Generally the theme you use does the cropping for display. If that theme uses custom sizes (this ia theme designer's decision for layout reasons) your manual custom crops will not be used at all.

As of the menu, some themes have support for it. See the theme's section. Also there is a theming tutorial about the basics of theming.

There is a problem with that plugin if your site does not have `gettext()` support built in. There will be a fix in tonight's nightly build.

That is great! Thank you. By the way, this is an extremely awesome CMS. As a dangerous DIY total web idiot, (I am barely able to make my way through CCS) I have figured out how to do almost everything I envisioned. So far, although more difficult to figure out than WordPress, it has been exactly what I was looking for. I can upload tons of photos off my iPhone to any of my albums and it takes almost no time at all. Thank you!

I will get the build tonight and see if that fixes the two problems I've had.