Saving

Maybe you can enlighten me on this topic. I don’t see why saving a temporary file to a directory intended for temporary files should be avoided. This follows the very basic behavior that every web file-submission <form> uses – saving the uploaded file to a temporary directory during upload, then moving it to its final location immediately afterward. In fact, I’m using WordPress’s get_temp_dir() function to determine the temp directory in which to save the temp file, then using WordPress’s media_handle_sideload() function to move it to the wp-content/uploads directory. This is all in the same manner that WordPress does such things. This seems acceptable and standardized to me. I would rather not dirty up wp-content with a custom temp folder that a user might get confused about. I would never want custom temp folders to end up being part of someone’s site backup, for example.

It might work out to provide an option in the plugin’s settings page to allow a user to specify a custom temp directory location, but I hesitate to add settings like that that generally wouldn’t get changed and might make things just look more cluttered.

1. #1 reason – plugin doesn’t work
2. With just 100 active users, and yet the only plugin available that does this, consider that most people throw in the towel rather than bother and report a problem which you have basically ignored.
3. What other plugin does this?
4. Seriously, muck up the backup? With SVG files? BackupWPup makes it easy to excluded files if someone thinks it is a problem

This is the temp folder on my mac. It is invisible to users:

/var/folders/g7/tbfnkx8531v0yhtqrnyb58fc0000gp/T//private/var/folders/g7/tbfnkx8531v0yhtqrnyb58fc0000gp/T/phpq7EmXZ

This is the tmp folder on my vps:

/tmp//tmp/phpSfZA7o

I tried altering the permissions to no avail.
So it’s up to you Mr Chips.
Stay stubborn and see your hard work lost to oblivion or go normal and ride the golden chariot to success!

PS I go the temp folder by echoing the following to the plugin’s admin page at the end of one of the paragraphs:

$tmpfname

So basically you have completely disabled all php temp files on your server? That seems very limiting.

I think the most reasonable solution here is to have an option in the plugin settings page that allows the user to save temp files per the current behavior, or to choose to save temp files to wp-content instead. That should cover just about any configuration and desired behavior that might be encountered. I’ll put this option in the next release.

Actually, one more question.

Are you sure that the temp file location is the source of the problem you’re seeing? According to the definition for get_temp_dir(), it eventually chooses the wp-content folder if the other sys and php temp folders were not writable. Perhaps there is some other bug or plugin conflict at play here?

Are you getting an error message when you try to save an image that you created with the plugin? What was the message?

Thanks

No, I did NOT disable temp files. Wouldn’t even know how.
I was just documenting where the plugin was trying to send temps on my Mac and on my VPS – 2 completely different beasts, but neither happy about it.
Even so, yes there could be a conflict. I put drawit on 4 installs – 2 on my mac and 2 on VPS all with the same result. Saving png works fine.
Last conflict I had was with Jetpack opentags that activated when I deactivated another SEO plugin. I found the routine to disable it. My site has no problem with 2 other OpenGraph plugins, so the bug is in JetPack.
One possibility is I have SVG MIME already configured.
Drawit still needs me to activate SVG before I can try to save to it.
If you do go for “Uploads”, please keep it in the root so it works with single and multi-sites the same way.

I added an option for choosing wp-content/uploads/drawit_temp/ instead of the default location. Can you update to 1.0.10 and give this a try? Thanks.

Yup. It works on Mac and VPS.
I added the plugin to my colophon.

Great, glad to hear!

Not sure if your colophon updates its download links automatically when new plugin versions are released. If not, then you should update the link for DrawIt to download version 1.0.12 – the older version 1.0.10 breaks some installations that use an older version of php. Thanks.

That’s a wordpress plugin that gets the data out of the repository.
If you click “more info” it flips the card to show version and date of last release.