Joomla : changing file upload settings & other lessons learned

Issue : By default in joomla 1.6, administrators are only allowed to upload image files of 10MB in size via the PHP administrator interface, using “Media Manager”. We needed to allow Joomla admins to upload a variety of filetypes (such as PDFs, DOCs, etc) and with a file upload limit of 100MBs

Solution :

1. Access the administrator interface in joomla > content > media manager

2. Click the “Options” button on the top right

3. In the resulting pop-up, make sure your file extensions are part of the list “Legal Extensions (File Types)”. Do the same for “Legal MIME types”. See the following link for a list of MIME types:

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/mime-types.shtml

4. Change the “Maximum Size” to your chosen value

5. Enable the flash uploader (it’s easier to use, allows multiple file uploads)

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That’s all that’s needed from the GUI. However, there are still some changes that need to be done to the webserver. PHP imposes some global limits on file uploads that need to be changed. If these are not modified to reflect you new 100MB limit, you will be presented with an error message along the lines of: "please input a file for upload”

1. Open a SSH shell to the webserver.

2. Use your favourite editor to open the file “php.ini”, so for example using nano:

# nano /etc/php.ini

3. Edit or create the following variables:

file_uploads = On

upload_max_filesize = 100M

post_max_size = 8M

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PS: this forum post also suggests to define the variable “live_site” in the joomla configuration. php, but this didnt’ make any difference to me.

One other error encountered when uploading files was: File Error: httpStatus.

In case you also run into this error, try using Internet Explorer or Chrome. If your preferred borwser is Firefox, try using the “IE tab” plugin.