CMS Image preview not working an internal demo site

Question

I have a local demo website which is protected by a .htaccess to showcase to the customer. Anyways, in this installation the image preview in the CMS WYSIWYG editor is not working.

In the system.log there is an entry:

ERR (3): Warning: getimagesize(http://example.com/skin/adminhtml/default/
  test/images/wysiwyg/skin_image.png): 
  failed to open stream: 
  HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required
  in /var/www/public/lib/Varien/Image/Adapter/Gd2.php on line 71

Answer 1

Magento makes HTTP access to fetch the included images from the webserver - even if it might be the same server.

The solution is to allow the local host to access itself without password. In Apache this would be:

Require valid-user
Allow from 127.0.0.1
Satisfy Any

Answer 2

Rewrite Mage_Adminhtml_Cms_WysiwygController controller and replace the code below in the directiveAction method:

$url = Mage::getModel('core/email_template_filter')->filter($directive);

with:

$url = str_replace(Mage::getBaseUrl('media'), Mage::getBaseDir('media') . DS, $url);