Categories
maintenance programming

Is there any good way to upload files to WordPress blogs?

As far as I can tell: no (?). I’m hoping it’s just that my Google-Fu is too weak, and there’s a solution out there that someone has already put together…

Wordpress runs on a MySQL DB, which is more than capable of having every uploaded file (even on most image-blogs) put direct into the DB. But WordPress doesn’t do that; instead it lazily dumps files into a folder on the hard-disk, with little or no protection, and none of the obvious stuff you’d expect for a blog.

WordPress has no version-control, no backup-support, and – according to the docs last time I checked – no protection against two files that randomly have the same name being uploaded to different posts on the same day (one post will get its file deleted, allegedly (maybe fixed by now?)).

I’m bringing this up because (apart from annoying me for well over a year now) someone’s just pointed out that all the source code I uploaded last year is now 404’ing because, of course, it wasn’t restored when I restored the rest of the blog after my server crashed. And they’d like to read it. But having to *manually* manage all the files that are in your blog is just … insane … IMHO.

If there is truly nothing out there, I’ll put “find out how to write a WP plugin to fix this design flaw” on my todo list, but I suspect that it could be a *lot* of work, simply because of the new Flash file-upload widget stuff that WP have added in the latest versions. It looks like there could be a LOT of integration work to do to replace the default crappy file upload. That would mean I may well never get around to it :).