Wordpress 2.5 upload fix

Looks like even after exten­sive test­ing on Wordpress’s side, one nasty bug man­aged to slip through, and it’s not the fault of Word­press either. Appar­ently, any­one using mod_security on Apache will not be able to upload any­thing on Word­press 2.5 or Word­press 2.5.1. This could be because mod_security doesn’t take a lik­ing towards the Flash uploader Word­press now uses. This is a big prob­lem for Word­press, since more than 30% of the Inter­net uses mod_security (cour­tesy of Host­ga­tor and numer­ous other Inter­net web hosts), which means these upload­ers won’t work if you sim­ply install Word­press and do noth­ing else after.

The fix?

Sim­ply cre­ate or edit your .htac­cess using your text edi­tor. Insert the fol­low­ing lines to the file:

<IfMod­ule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
Sec­Fil­terEngine Off
Sec­Fil­ter­Scan­POST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

That should switch off secu­rity only for your uploader, and chances are your uploader should work fine.

Alter­na­tively, since the entire prob­lem is caused by Flash, you could try dis­abling the Flash uploader using a plu­gin that does that.

—

A sec­ond glitch is that some­times the media gallery in Word­press 2.5 may not be able to insert images. In addi­tion to that, changes to your post might be lost for unknown rea­sons after doing that. Nonetheless, you can insert the image in another method by copy­ing the URL of the image in the gallery and insert­ing it via Add Image in the toolbar.

Tagged as: Patch, Update, Wordpress