WordPress has a set of restricted filetypes it will allow you to upload via the media library. Whilst this is a great security feature, there may be times where you’d like to add other files that are restricted by default, or maybe even the opposite where you’d only like to allow a few extensions to be uploaded. Fortunately, WordPress makes this dead easy with a small snippet of PHP code.
If you’d like to add or remove a specific filetype that can be uploaded to wordpress via the media library, you can insert this PHP code in your theme functions.php file:
function my_myme_types($mime_types){ //Adjust the $mime_types, which is an associative array where the key is extension and value is mime type. return $mime_types; } add_filter('upload_mimes', 'my_myme_types', 1, 1);
Here is an example of what you can do to add and remove a new filetype (in this example, I’m adding an extension that already exists, but the concept is the same):
function my_myme_types($mime_types){ $mime_types['avi'] = 'video/avi'; //Adding avi extension unset($mime_types['pdf']); //Removing the pdf extension return $mime_types; } add_filter('upload_mimes', 'my_myme_types', 1, 1);
You can also reset the allowed filetypes by creating a new array within the function and returning these values:
function my_myme_types($mime_types){ //Creating a new array will reset the allowed filetypes $mime_types = array( 'jpg|jpeg|jpe' => 'image/jpeg', 'gif' => 'image/gif', 'png' => 'image/png', 'bmp' => 'image/bmp', 'tif|tiff' => 'image/tiff' ); return $mime_types; } add_filter('upload_mimes', 'my_myme_types', 1, 1);
If you’d like to see what filetypes are currently supported by wordpress, check out the function get_allowed_mime_types
located in the wp-includes/functions.php
file.