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1. colinmcgray
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Hi there,

   I was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction for writing a plugin modification. I work at a university and we use Podcasts quite a lot with the Podpress plugin.

   I'm having a lot of difficulty getting less technically able staff to complete the process though, mainly copying the file location into Podpress.

   What I really need is a file selector and upload tool within the podcasting plugin itself. I'm thinking this might not be too hard to write, perhaps basing it around the wordpress file upload tool somehow.

   Before I start to look into it though I wondered if anyone had any tips on what WP functions might be useful, or even if this just isn't possible. It surprises me that none of the podcasting plugins include this functionality so perhaps there's a big snag somewhere.

   Any help or pointers would be appreciated.

   Thanks
   Colin

2. ntm
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Hi Colin,

   the upload of media files is not part of podPress because audio or video file are usually relative big files (often clearly bigger than image files) and uploading via an dialog of a web site (a dialog of a WP plugin) means HTTP with a PHP script and that is often very limited due to time, file size and memory limits. Furthermore these limits are not equal on different servers.
   That is why I would recommend for uploads of big files FTP/SFTP client programs. Often that is the only way to upload files.
   For relative small files one can use the WP media uploader (the icons above the post editor box). (This upload dialog has to fight also with these limits).

   If you upload files with e.g. FTP then you can add them with the plugin Add From Server to the media library of your blog.

   You are definitely right with the other aspect. It would be nice to have a file picker which would make it easier to select a media file (location).
   There is actually one possibility to have such a thing. If you fill out the "Absolute path of the media files directory (optional)" option at the general settings page of podPress and if this folder includes media files then there will be selectbox which includes the media files instead of the simple input field.
   Also I'm working on a file picker which will use all the nice techniques like AJAX, the jQuery and jQuery UI library.
   This will be a part of one of the next versions.

   Regards,
   Tim

   BTW: If you write posts related to a certain plugin, it is a good idea to use the short name of the plugin as a tag (e.g. podpress). This forum offers special tag feeds. For instance I'm following only the the podpress tag feed and I'm searching only sporadically for "podpress" in the whole forum.

3. colinmcgray
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Thanks very much for that help Tim, really clears up a few things for me. That's interesting too regarding the 'Absolute path' option, I hadn't noticed that before. I always imagined that it was probably a problem of drastically differing server configurations making it too complicated, but that just makes me think it should be easy enough to create a individualised plugin for myself given that I know my server configuration and it wont change. I'm really a php amateur though so might have to pay someone else to do that for me. I can see the constituent parts and how it should work but just can't quite figure it out...

   At the moment I'm also thinking about trying to create my own little plugin that calls the built in wordpress media uploader, but just makes it a little more obvious that that's how to upload a podcast. I've already tried altering the media upload buttons to say 'Upload podcast' but obviously that'll need re-doing after every upgrade so isn't ideal...

   Great to hear you're working on an upload function in the background as well - any idea on timescales for that at the moment?

4. ntm
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Great to hear you're working on an upload function in the background as well

   No, I'm not doing such a thing beacause of the fundamental problems of the HTTP upload. For instance I know some servers where the upload_max_filesize is only 10 MB. The recomended default is 2MB and the podcast episodes I'm listening are usually 40-250MB. At least I see no way to upload such big files via HTTP if one is not able to rise these server limits. I believe the other podcast plugins don't have an own upload dialog for the same reasons. (but I have not looked in a while.)

   If you discover a way to upload such big files despite these limits then I would be happy if you would tell me were I can find more information about this method.

   I think the WP upload dialog is technically very good and you should maybe concentrate your search on ways to customize the look and feel of that dialog rather than trying to build a new one from scratch.

   I'm working on a filepciker dialog. A dialog to choose a already uploaded files which are in sub folders of the blog. I'm doing that to replace the existing selectbox option. This selectbox is only a drop-down menu/list of files of one folder and it is not possible to browser to different folders. Furthermore using the "Absolute path of the media files directory (optional)" option has a limiting side effect. If you use it and you are adding media files via this selectbox to your post and you decide later to change the path then all the links in the posts to all previously added media files will be wrong. So if you use that option, don't change the path.

   Regards,
   Tim

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