May 11th, 2020

Part 2: WordPress Plugin Uploading Media and using Web Services

Uploading Files

The goal of the plugin is to convert a PDF in WordPress’ media directory into HTML using the web service. So first of all we need to extend the plugin we created last time to have a form which handles the uploads. We also need to handle the incoming file, which we do in test_handle_post(), where we use the media_handle_upload() function to upload the file to the media folder. Below is the commented code of how to do so:

The admin page should now look like this when a file has been uploaded:

And to verify it went into the media folder:

Now we want to actually convert the file to html using the web service (Note: We no longer provide a SOAP service, so the below code is out of date, but you can learn more about how to convert PDFs to HTML5/SVG in PHP here). Below I have amended the conversion method onto the plugin:

And if we look in the output directory of the plugin folder, we should see our converted document:

Now that we know how to upload a PDF file to the media directory, it is also possible to create list of the files to display and then select which one to use. I won’t mention how to do it here for the sake of brevity but if you’re interested in trying this, have a look at get_posts() method on the WordPress Codex.

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