Plupload - A beautiful file uploader powered by jQuery | Hacker News Reader

Plupload - A beautiful file uploader powered by jQuery

plupload.com

120 pointsgourneau27 comments

Bit of a negative sentiment - pity. Beautiful is a rather subjective thing. It looks not too shabby and there is the core api if you want to make it look really different. The big thing to me is - it is here NOW, it seems to work in the hodge-podge of browsers I've to support, nicely falling back with decreasing browser smartness. And it uses jquery - which I happen to use as well.

I've an application shipping in a few weeks, which has some minor features which require uploading files. Those are not that often used, so I've not spent much time on the upload part yet - just a basic file-upload form.

Things like this however allow me to make those file-uploads look way nicer (from the point of view of the end-user) with very little time investment from my side. And it allows me to do it NOW. And if I want to be cheap, I can get it even for free! (I know, I know, GPL is not about being cheap, leave the torches at home please ;-).

Given the above, I'm not overly concerned as to how it works out over 3 years from now. I've to ship in 4 weeks. And whatever solution I choose now is not set in stone.

So a big "thanks" for a) putting in the hard work and making the tool in the first place and b) bringing it to my attention.

(having said that: I also tripped over the large plus sign in the header ... - but that is easily modified of course, not a major thing).

My point is.... Yes, ship in four weeks, but ship to modern browsers with an elegant html5-only decision

Old browsers can have a single, basic file input.

The ui isn't very good. The static header looks like the button that you press to upload.

I read this comment, went to look at it, and still clicked on the header just because I couldn't believe it wasn't actually a button.

Calling it "not very good" is a lot nicer than it deserves. It makes no sense to sacrifice functionality for "beauty" in a file upload widget. (And it's not like the rest of it is especially nice looking anyway.)

I'm also really kind of wondering why it's so large. It takes up 258180 pixels by default--that's about a third of my browser window. Unless you're putting this on a page that's meant only for file uploading, it's probably going to take up too much room.

The fact that gigantic, non-functional, unwieldy things like this (and TinyMCE, which happens to have been developed by the same people) are considered the best solutions is one of the reasons I've really come to dislike working with the big open-source CMS's.

As mentioned below, this seems very good http://valums.com/ajax-upload/

I'd be more comfortable styling this to fit my needs than a forced fully blown gizmo

The "forced fully blown gizmo" is basically a demo for the underlying code and is completely separate to it. Looking at the github repo, there is apparently a new style jQuery UI demo to replace this.

As someone who has built code against it, you would be foolish to dismiss it.

I'm frustrated that in this day and age this is the best solution people recommend.

Are there any elegant HTML5 multiple file uploaders out there with drag and drop?

That, and direct S3 upload, is the Holy Grail for me.

I mean, screw supporting old browsers

Given them a basic, single file uploaded with no fancy

A clean HTML5 implementation, with nice features, is more valued

Totally!

I mean, it's not like you can offer people the svelte, clean, fancy option and fall back to HTML POST if that doesn't work or anything. Nosirree.

Is this a form of self-satire? I don't understand what is going on here.

No, I genuinely would prefer the browser natively handle file transfers rather than relying on old browser plugins and lots of hacks to get old browsers to work

* http://valums.com/ajax-upload/

* http://digitarald.de/project/fancyupload/

Thanks!

I like the ajax upload.... very simple

fancyupload uses flash.... unless you are Facebook or a government website, I'd avoid all that fancy stuff and keep it simple for the future!

Whats wrong with this solution that would be solved with an HTML5-only solution?

Complexity.

Dropping back to native is thinking about the future rather than supporting the past with tired hacks and stupid browser plugins.

@samdk: Plupload is separated into a core API and a jQuery widget that has the UI. So if you don't like the UI you can just change it anyway you like. Also I think you should buy a bigger screen if you think it's to large. 800x600 isn't the default screen size these days. :)

@xcvd: HTML5 upload is far from ready yet. Since only the absolutely latest browsers support it and some of them have pretty serious bugs or limitations. Also IE has still like 50% of the market so unless that changes soon there is a need for fallbacks to Flash, Silverlight etc. We just wanted to develop an uploader that would work regardless of what technology the user has.

"You browser doesn't have Flash, Silverlight, Gears, BrowserPlus or HTML5 support."

My browser has <input type="file"> support but it's being completely ignored. I hope whoever wrote this markup will study progressive enhancement, because ugly is better than unusable.

You can chose to enable/disable the various uploading methods at runtime, including HTML4. This must have been disabled on the example you looked at.

I have used this, it really works well. You dont have to use the example UI they give you, you can build your own. It throws all the relevant events from a unified API. The UI you see exists in a totally separate library from the core.

I have put it in a couple of projects. Best file upload solution I've found.

It's from moxiecode, the people who did TinyMce.

Uploadify is also a jQuery plugin and works really well for us:

http://www.uploadify.com/

There's this: https://github.com/jurisgalang/jquery-sexypost which is a fit for a more general use-case, but it allows you to attach to upload events and roll your own progress indicator.

Selected three files and started uploading, some seconds later it crashed my Chrome (10.0.628.0 dev on Win7). And that header is really a mess (like richcollins said). Too bad I can't say anything positive about it (I would if it worked for me :)).

I don't understand. Why is this any different than most jquery upload plugins?

Also, I tried the demo and didn't want to use Google Gears. After I didn't allow Gears permission, the uploader stopped working. This is a problem.

File a bug. Be a good citizen.

I just switched one of my projects to this. It's nice, but doesn't properly relay responses from uploads to other domains. I understand that may be a limitation of the Flash runtime though.

Ugh flash...pass

Dragging a file into the browser window (Chrome 8, Win 7) I get a popup saying "Invalid extension: <full filename>".

I guess it can use some more work.

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