Use HTML 5 uploading capabilities (instead of Flash)

[Otto42]

Firefox 3.6 and Webkit and a few others now support improved file handling capabilities for uploads. This can enable simple javascript pages to do things like drag and drop file uploading, progress meter uploading, etc.

Suggest detecting these browser cases and supporting them with a nicer interface instead of using Flash, which doesn't work in many setups (notably, it doesn't go through firewalls).

Examples and documentation:

• ​http://www.appelsiini.net/demo/html5_upload/demo.html
• ​http://www.appelsiini.net/2009/10/html5-drag-and-drop-multiple-file-upload
• ​http://www.thecssninja.com/javascript/drag-and-drop-upload

Additional: ​http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/

As I mentioned in last week's dev chat, I would like replace the current uploader with ​Plupload, which uses whatever uploading capability is available to the current client, including HTML 5, Flash, Gears, and Silverlight.

Nice. If we can outsource the bulk of this functionality to some other well-supported GPL2 project, I think that's a good idea.

Not so sure about the default interface plupload provides or some of those features though. Still, maybe it can work.

We don't need the default interface. Plupload has an API much like SWFUpload's, allowing one to trigger callbacks at particular upload events. I think we could more or less swap it in with the current client code used for SWFUpload.

Most of the work will be on the backend, because the WP upload functions assume the use of $_FILES, which won't work for chunking.

Plugin implementing this released: ​http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wplupload/

I tried it. It works quite nicely.

There is a GSoC 2011 project about this.

#18206