Location of documents uploaded to WordPress site for Premium plan
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I am looking to migrate (well, rebuild) a customer site, and have elected to choose WordPress (the customer will be doing future modifications on the site, adding new articles as he prepares them). It is a very simple site, and I am attempting to replicate most of the ‘features’ that are on the existing site.
The user has is a page on the site that simply lists articles he has written, with title and hyperlinks that will open the relevant media (actually just PDF documents) stored on the site.
On the existing site, his documents are all stored in a folder ‘documents’, but I have seen that the document (at this stage, at least, not having paid any monies to WordPress) appear in a folder labelled https://xxxxxxxx.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/yyyyyyyy.pdf (ie with the sub-folder showing the date on which the document was uploaded.
If I allow this to proceed in this manner, when the real domain name is transferred to point to the wordpress version of the site, existing links that users may have to these document will no longer work (even if the URL changes, as I hope, to be prefixed with his real domain name, followed by documentsyyyyyyyyy.pdf. It would also mean that if he uploads a document today, and sends out links to this document, then changes the document tomorrow, the previous URL will no longer work (as the upload date / folder will change). I can put in a 404 page to handle this, but it isn’t quite as effective.
The help system provided by WordPress is great, but not quite granular enough to locate an answer to this question, unfortunately.
Will upgrading to the Premium plan allow me to specify where the documents are to be uploaded, and is my assumption regarding the URL naming convention true?
There are a number of other similar ‘issues’ related to this very simple site that I suspect from Google searching will be answered by a similar payment, but I cannot find a extensive list of what is really available.
Many thanks for your help.
Ray
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Hello Ray,
I’m afraid there’s no way to prevent this. Even on our Business Plan, where you can change the permalink structure for posts, the media library uses a date-folder structure for files uploaded to the library. And replacing a file will also always result in a completely new media file URL, even if the file names are the same, and the original file was deleted from the library before you uploaded the replacement. This is how the media library in the WordPress software itself is designed to work.
There is no way to have media files be uploaded to a custom location instead on WordPress.com. That might be possible with the open source version found on WordPress.org, but you’ll need to ask at https://wordpress.org/support/forums/ to make sure of that.
The WordPress software is pretty smart, though, and if you were to connect a custom domain to the site, if someone clicks on any existing for that domain the software can, to a large extent, still match up those links with the correct content on the site, even if the permalink structure is not exactly the same. But it won’t work in all cases.
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Thanks for that very comprehensive reply.
Ouch is all I can say – I had hoped the permalink structure would accomplish this somehow, although I was struggling to understand this.
Maybe I’m getting to old!
I also looked into using a 404 page, to point to the page with the document links on it, but it appears that the theme doesn’t me to modify the 404 page, and the search offered doesn’t (yet?) allow the user to search for a document.
I will persist though with the user, as the site looks very close to the original hand-coded one he was so adamant he ‘loves’ (maybe because it is so simple).
Again thanks -
Hi there,
I also looked into using a 404 page, to point to the page with the document links on it, but it appears that the theme doesn’t me to modify the 404 page
For that, you need to get the Business plan which allows you to edit your theme’s pages.
the search offered doesn’t (yet?) allow the user to search for a document.
The built-in search can only find text contained in posts and pages. You can, however, create a page with all the downloads which will be searchable.
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Many thanks for your response.
I will talk to the client about this further.Nice to know that there are bery helpful people out there in help land. Appreciate your help and time.
Regards
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