So I am new at this whole WordPress game.  Having developed some pretty nice chops in Ruby on Rails the last year or so, I figured I was too hip for an out of the box CMS system.  However, after lamenting the mobile apps support that I could provide myself using a homegrown rails blog, I decided to install WordPress on my MacMini web server and am very happy that I did.

WordPress provides an elegant interface that allows me to do pretty much everything I want to do (including changing the entire look and feel via some simple css and php editing). This in combination with having a pretty solid mobile app and all kinds of plugins makes me wonder why anyone would use anything else for a basic website (true web apps are another story).

That is not to say that all has been smooth in WordPress land.  One of the problems (or blessings if you like to learn new things) of running your own webserver is that you are your own tech support for pretty much everything.  If you can’t figure something out on your own or find it on Google, you are pretty much screwed.  I thought I had reached that point tonight, but overcame through perseverance, serious searching, and accidentally looking in the wrong directory.

The problem:

The default upload file limit that PHP allows in an OS X hosted environment is 2 MB.  As WordPress is a PHP app, this limit prevents you from posting anything larger than 2 MB.  This is an extremely low number and even uploading photos would often fail because of this limitation.  Doing some preliminary Googleing indicated that modifying the server’s php.ini by changing the values of

upload_max_filesize = xM

and

post_max_size = xM

to where “x” equals the number of megabytes that you would like to allow and then restarting Apache would resolve this dilemma.

However, there are multiple php.ini files and pretty much every post you see will recommend that you modify the one in either siteroot/wp-admin or siteroot/wp-include.  I edited all of them accordingly and even found a version of the file in the root of my apache2 directory and edited that one and still I was unable to successfully get WordPress to let me upload files larger than 2 MB

The solution:

After bouncing around in TextWrangler and wondering if I had lost my ability to support myself, I accidentally browsed to the folder above apache2 (/private/etc) and low and behold there was another php.ini file.  I modified this one, bounced Apache, sacrificed a goat, and it worked!  Victory!