Allow media upload in the front end edit area

[Patricia]

We have community front end adding of events in place for our calendar, and our users need to be able to upload a flyer – I didn’t realize they wouldn’t be able to do that and it’s an issue for our users. I have two questions:

1. They can upload a jpg/gif via the image uploader, which could be workaround if the image was allowed to be linkable in the single event page. Is there a way to turn on that capability? To allow the thumbnail image to open to the full size one when clicked?

2. Is there a way to allow media uploading in the visual editor portion on the add/edit window?

Thanks!

[Brook]

Howdy Patricia,

I would love to help you with this.

The image they can upload via community is the WP featured image. Not all themes use this image, but most do. For those that do it will usually be displayed prominently on the page. But it is only one image.

Adding more images is just not possible without heavy modification. Of course there is a big security concern with allowing people to upload images, which is a main reason why WP and other sites don’t typically let users upload images for comments and such. But if properly configured the risk is minimal. If you’d like to forge ahead and configure your own uploader, you might try a plugin like this. That one adds the ability for users to upload arbitrary images then link to them in comments. A plugin like that would be a good starting place for allowing users to upload images, from there they can just link to them.

If you’re interested in an easier solution though, you might suggest to users to upload images to a third party image hosting service like imgur.com. From there they can link to them.

Does that all make sense? Will that work for you? Please let me know.

Cheers!

– Brook

[Patricia]

Hi Brook
Thanks for your response – I understood that the image is a single one for a featured image, but in the body of the single event view, that image is not clickable to open up to a larger version. The upload to comment, while interesting, I don’t think applies in this situation.

I was trying to figure out how they could upload within the event front end edit area by using the media upload interface that is already there – that way they could upload a PDF flyer of their event and include it in the content/description of the event.

[Brook]

Thank you for clarifying.

There are some serious security concerns with allowing people to upload PDFs to your site, and then showing them publicly. PDFs are frequently used to attack website viewers. And if someone maliciously uploads one to your site you can get blacklisted on Google and elsewhere as a malware site.

If you do wish to forge ahead with allowing folks to upload arbitrary files and view the original full size versions I understand. I just wanted you to be aware of why this sort of thing is rare. You will need to build the functionality yourself. It is not a feature we plan to add due to the security concerns for more users. You could use something like the comment uploader as a nice starting point for adding this feature. From there you will need a decent measure of experience with PHP and WP to fit this into our plugin.

Does that answer your questions? Can I be of further assistance?

Cheers!

– Brook

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

[Author]

Posts