We have a problem with the wpDataTables plugin. Content in our /wp-content/uploads/ directory gets offloaded to an Amazon S3 bucket after approximately 10 days. To avoid a 404 error for uploaded files in web browsers, nginx provides a redirect for any files that it sees as "404", and rewrites them to be served from Amazon S3. This is a service designed to provide us unlimited paid disk space, by our provider at http://www.wpengine.com.

If we generate a table or chart from an uploaded excel spreadsheet, say /wp-content/uploads/x/xxxx/xx/excel.xls - the table or chart will work until the file gets uploaded to Amazon S3.

The error that will show up in wpDataTables indicates file not found: (/nas/content/live/mbari/wp-content/uploads/x/xxxx/xx/excel.xls). This indicates the file is being looked for locally on the server and not via URL. Since the file has moved, and an nginx redirect is not used at the local level, a 404 is encountered.

Possible Solutions and Feature Requests
1) Allow us to customize where the target of "Upload" is via wpdatatables - eg: a directory outside of /wp-content/uploads/ so that the file will not get uploaded to Amazon S3.
2) Refer to the file via URL (http://www.mbari.org/wp-content/uploads/x/xxxx/xx/file.xls) instead of local path (/nas/content/live/mbari/). This will still serve the data due to the nginx redirect reading the file from S3.

Unfortunately we cannot cherry-pick which files get uploaded to Amazon S3, it has to be offloaded at the directory level - (/wp-content/uploads/). So we must issue these feature requests to the plugin developer.

Thank you,

Nancy

Hello Bogdan,

This is a good workaround. We created a new directory and pasted the path into wpDataTables and now it works as it should. Thank you so much!

Nancy