Mauro Vicariotto

@foosantos, for your info I found the issue: it was a remnant of an old plugin of Katsushi Kawamori, “Extend Media Upload” (no longer existing) which was repetitively recreating a folder with the date of its first installation.

Probably it’s connected with what I found in the web: “This plugin has been closed as of June 21, 2023 and is not available for download. This closure is permanent. Reason: Author Request.”

Solved with a search in SQL + a deep sweep.

Thank you for your time.

@foosantos, thanks again for the suggestion. Yes I will limit myself to make a deep clean of db to sweep transient and typos, but will not touch info. It must be a php instruction such as mkdir, but where it is written … I must patiently make a research in all remaining plugins. Will let you know, for curiosity.

Regards.

Hi @foosantos and thank you for your your comment. If you read my previous topic I never said that it is related to the theme! Or might be you wrote this because we are in TS area … yes, that is because I have some friends in this section and last time I commented the issue with them.

TI think that the issue depends on an old plugin (no longer existing) that creates new folder in media libraries: it is possible to delete all empty folders except for the very first one created in wp by date and month (created before installing it): folder 2019 (year) and subfolder 6 (month).

My reconstruction of the facts is : I started creating folders by date … then added this plugin … the plugin fixed some info in the db … then once deleted the plugin remained a trace in SQL.

Few years ago I deleted the 70% of plugins (prefer to write my codes in functions).

I know it is not very important, but since all my child themes are complex and sophisticated, and I always wish to have all clean, this only flaw has become a matter of fussiness, as well as worrying me that there is a bug in the db.

I have plenty of backups of my themes and database, so I wish to try to understand what happened.

Just I want to know where to fix the media folders in SQL (wp_options?).

Thank you

Mauro

Good day to you @jordesign, thank you.

Yes, I guess so.

Thank you very much, I will check

Thank you for your reply. Sorry to say that it is not safe for us to apply your (great) plugin: our structure is really too complex, mainly “just based on wp but with totally tweaked structure”. In any case your plugin is wonderful .. pity.

Hello and thank you for prompt reply.

Which part you’re not confident to have understood? Because if you don’t understand well my doubts you can’t say it is safe for us.

F.e. when I say “uncommon methods” I mean that some external codes are embedded directly in “pages” (the admin interface which creates the “html pages” via templates (all modified)), so if the links are encrypted not sure they can be read) ..

or we never “attach” a media in a page but always embed via css or directly in the page (using the url’s in css or js) ..

even some our php functions get some html code pieces in which embedded some media or file via plain url ..

then there are some complex codes that call some external files like Excel and convert in html table, then to pdf output ..

etc.

• This reply was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by Mauro Vicariotto.

and if I change the folders permission via ftp? public: not read , yes execute

thank you

Yes thx,

I was thinking to store the files in a different url. But I just wanted to try some examples which are on the web, working on .htaccess or on functions.php:

https://formidableforms.com/protect-wordpress-media-files/
https://www.download-monitor.com/wordpress-restrict-access-to-media-files/
https://www.noupe.com/wordpress/how-to-protect-wordpress-files-and-uploads-folder.html
https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-restrict-media-library-access-to-users-own-uploads-in-wordpress/
https://www.greengeeks.com/tutorials/protect-media-library-wordpress-users-uploads/

https://preventdirectaccess.com/restrict-wordpress-media-library-permissions/
https://locall.host/wordpress-prevent-direct-access-to-media-files/

but for no one works

Dear @threadi, you misunderstood or I didn’t explain well.

Private files is meant for complicated pictures, internal structure, complex scripts that took weeks to make and we shouldn’t be happy to share … sorry but it is not true that if we prevent external usage of internal files the website doesn’t work!

All the internal structure works well as it must be, but simply redirect to 404 all attempts to access from external to wp-content/uploads/…

Of course, with a simple inspection tool they can still have access, but we don’t want to make life easy for those who simply want to copy and paste our jobs.

@bcworkz, totally agree with you about developers.

Regarding plugins of course I use some of them too when useful, but most of sites I make are highly personalized and too often I lose a lot of time to adapt the plugin to my needs, anyhow I also confirm that some tech plugin is absolutely useful.

(I’m not a professional programmer either but as a hobby, or to create websites and IT parts for my activities)

Thank you for all, it was a very pleasant discussion, and I really hope that we will keep in touch

Dear @bcworkz,

I really never understood why some wp developers discouraged me from going down the road of external interfaces to wp: I just had strict time and given their reaction (in that case we never even went into the matter, only generically mentioned .xsl or .csv interfaces) I just put that project in stand-by.

Yes, I can write some good codes in php (of course takes time because I’m surely not “top level” indeed), but in any case I prefer to avoid plugins for some special issues, because generally the plugins have fixed design, and you lose more time to tewak a plugin than to make it.

Thank you for your good suggestion (I really never understood why I was discouraged that time, a couple of years ago, probably the developer didn’t have skills in php, or simply didn’t want to enter too much in the matter: practically the reply was that “wp is a fixed machine, and to do what I wanted I should have entered in deep system, modding parts out of wp-content … bah)

@bcworkz yes, I agree with you: simple .txt or (better) .csv.

Regarding the interface input form I was studying it also for other wp sites, other needs (some product technical sheets to be periodically changed), but I stopped that project since some wp technician told me that such input solutions are very hard to apply to wordpress (infact I use external interfaces only for sites which aren’t wp)

do you have an idea or sample draft on how to structure it for wp? thx

They are human generated, yes could be an .xml rather than .txt, but they’re always short texts (few words). A structured form: you mean an interface? Yes, but it’d be a big job just for some texts, what are your thoughts?