Wordpress File Upload Error Security Fix

This is an UPDATE to snuff out all the whiny people that have been complaining about how this?‘old school fix’ isn’t the right way. When I wrote this it was around 5 years ago before wordpress had any nifty ways to get around this and before there were any cool plugins to solve the issue.

New ways

Thanks to @mikes comment… you can add this into your themes functions.php file which will allow text/x-vcard

add_filter(?upload_mimes?,'add_vcard_upload_support?));
function add_vcard_upload_support($mimes) {
$mimes['vcf|vcard'] = ?text/x-vcard?;
return $mimes;

Or you can just install a plugin like: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pjw-mime-config/

Old way

Here’s how to fix the “WordPress File Type does not meet security guidelines” error you get from trying to upload certain files.

First find out what the mime type of the file you were trying to upload is. You can go to w3schools or mozdev

Write down the file type ie: (application/x-shockwave-flash, or video/x-m4v) you also need the extension ie: (swf or m4v)

For WP 2.0 and up open up the wp-includes/functions.php file and goto around line 1069 All you have to do is follow the coding conventions in there and add your file types you want. Because they use a foreach loop to go through all the listed file types you can add as many as you like as long as they follow the convention there. For older versions of WP I think the correct file is: wp-admin/admin-functions.php

Look for this:

function wp_check_filetype($filename, $mimes = null) {
 // Accepted MIME types are set here as PCRE unless provided.
 $mimes = is_array($mimes) ? $mimes : apply_filters('upload_mimes', array (
  'vcf' => 'text/x-vcard',
  'jpg|jpeg|jpe' => 'image/jpeg',
??'gif' => 'image/gif',
??'png' => 'image/png',
??'bmp' => 'image/bmp',
??'tif|tiff' => 'image/tiff',

13. Feb, 2007