Category: Notes (Page 22 of 50)

One of the things that I like about open source the most is having discussions not only about how a person goes about doing something, but why they’ve chosen a particular route over an alternative.

Yes, reading books, articles, and other material from prolific, well-known, and respected programmers matters – I’m definitely not saying that we should throw that out – but there’s a lot that can be learned from peers who are sitting a couple of tweets, emails, or gists away from you.

Though I generally enjoy seeing how other people have approached their work and understanding the rationale behind it, I’m also pretty open about how I approach certain problems if for no other reason that the garner feedback from those of you who take the time to update gists, add comments, and so on.

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If you’re working on a project for WordPress that’s going to allow users to upload files – be it a video, an image, a CSV, or any other type of data – then you’re likely going to be faced with a situation where you’re going to need to determine if a file is too large for WordPress.

Yeah, it’s a little too large.

What’s considered “too large” can be related to any number of factors:

• The size of the file is larger than you want to accept (or the file system accepts)
• A PHP timeout occurs when uploading a file because of its size
• The file system doesn’t have enough space
• …and so on.

Whatever the case may be, there are two things that you’re going to need to be able to do:

1. Determine if the file fits within constraint of the system (whatever the constraint is)
2. Display an error message to the user before the upload occurs

It doesn’t exactly provide for a stellar experience when trying to upload something only to have it rejected by the server without a proper error message, does it?

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When it comes to working with long running scripts and WordPress, you’re usually at the mercy of one of two things:

1. PHP configuration file
2. The server’s PHP configuration

Granted, the case could be made that these are one and the same, and in a sense they are, but if you’re working with PHP on your local machine, you clearly have more control over the environment than when you’re working on a web server.

Technically, if you’re working on a dedicated server, you should have full control over the configuration of the environment.

If that’s not the case, this is article won’t be of much use; however, if you’re in the business of working with PHP scripts on your local machine and a shared server, and you’ve hit the maximum execution timeout message, then there are a few of ways to go about handling the problem.

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Programmatically uploading files to WordPress is really just the same as uploading files from any source location to a destination.

That is to say, there are a number of PHP functions all of which make it pretty easy to deal with file-level operations, grabbing files from one location, and moving them to the next.

And yes, there are some nuances that can come with PHP’s configuration such that you may not be able to write to certain directories, perform certain options via HTTP, and so on. All of these can be managed by either changing up the configuration or by changing the way in which files are handled by the code.

One thing that WordPress offers that manual uploads don’t manage is adding files – specifically media types – to the Media Library after uploading a file. This is relatively easy to do given media_sideload_image.

But let’s say the situation is a little more complex.

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