Don’t Give Up

Thom, this is NOT a support request per se. Rather, it is to share some recent, relevant operational environment information and perhaps provide some encouragement.

I installed File Away for performing tightly-controlled file uploads on a Dreamhost WordPress 5.9.3 website using the Twenty Sixteen template and PHP 7.4.15, and it continues to work flawlessly. After throwing some well-deserved money in Thom’s direction seven years ago, I wrote a review of his wonderfully useful and powerful plugin, and I just wanted to let folks know that it still exhibits full functionality on my Dreamhost installation.

Now, I just tried FA version 3.9.9.0.1 on one of my Windows 11 XAMPP localhost projects running WordPress 5.9.3, PHP 8.1.5, and the Twenty Twenty-Two theme, and as reported by others, FA does NOT work. I presume that there are some File Away/PHP 8.x incompatibilities.

Nonetheless, I decided to do a little experimenting, and I have determined that it’s not as hopeless as it may seem, at least for file management (and perhaps other) purposes! I discovered that the incredibly handy FA shortcode creator that File Away adds to the Tiny MCE editor does NOT, in fact work: nothing happens when the FA button is pressed. Bummer. However, I manually created a File Away shortcode based on the syntax of one of the FA uploaders on my aforementioned Dreamhost site, pasted it into a shortcode block on my localhost WordPress page, and FA worked as expected. Perhaps the only issue with FA is that the shortcode creator needs a little love in order to work in a PHP 8.x environment.

So, Thom, maybe I’m overly naive or just plain wrong, but perhaps it might not in fact be too difficult to position FA for the PHP 8.x world (easy for me to say, eh?) Admittedly, I just experimented with the file manipulation functionality, so who knows, maybe it’s not as “simple” as I imply.

For all us File Away lovers the Select Tutorial pick box under the Tutorials tab provides access to THE definitive listing of all the File Away shortcodes and attributes, so it would seem that for the PHP 8.x environment we can manually construct our own FA shortcodes and insert them as described above. And, manually styling File Away is simply not a huge deal.

Thom, I’m going to keep my fingers crossed for a File Away version 4.0! It’s a shame that people just don’t seem to understand how amazingly useful and powerful your plugin is.