File Management

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Zahor's picture

From my experience,there are a few major things lacking in Drupal. One of them that I have encountered a lot is the ability - or inability to manage files/documents effectively. I'd like to start laying the groundwork for a comprehensive file (or at least document) manager that allows some of the more popular feature requests e.g check in/check out, protected files & directories etc.

Comments

hmm.. file framework

sumitk's picture

Hi
I think file framework set of modules is answer for it

http://drupal.org/project/fileframework
http://drupal.org/project/bitcache

OpenBand really put a lot of efforts in file management in drupal which is working out of box :)

SO if it is something more than which is already there suggest :)

sumit kataria
www.sumitk.net

The Media module is

aaron's picture

The Media module is addressing all of these issues, by backporting PHP Stream Wrappers from d7 to d6, and creating a file browsing UI API.

Rather than duplicating existing functionality and reinventing the wheel, please jump on board with development: the working group for this project is at the Media group.

Aaron Winborn
Drupal Multimedia (book, in October!)
AaronWinborn.com (blog)
Advomatic (work)

Aaron Winborn
Drupal Multimedia (my book, available now!)
AaronWinborn.com
Advomatic

This was going to be for a

Zahor's picture

This was going to be for a drupal summer of code submission - but I'm open to suggestions for anything else.

Sorry for what probably came

aaron's picture

Sorry for what probably came out as a flippant reply. I responded too quickly, without really reading what you were offering. Sometimes I get a little annoyed when I see people planning to duplicate effort.

Yes! Please, we can definitely use your help with the GSOC! Alex and I were planning to create at least one idea for the GSOC around media file management, and this would certainly be a perfect fit. There are a lot of things on the road map that can be compartmentalized into GSOC tasks, such as file permissions and views integration.

Aaron Winborn
Drupal Multimedia (book, in October!)
AaronWinborn.com (blog)
Advomatic (work)

Aaron Winborn
Drupal Multimedia (my book, available now!)
AaronWinborn.com
Advomatic

Sure, I'd love to tackle -

Zahor's picture

Sure, I'd love to tackle - anything. Just let me know what specifically you and Alex had in mind.

FileFramework

JohnLucas's picture

Zahor, definitely check out FileFramework module by Miglius. You can see a quick demo as part of our DrupalCon presentation here at about 38minutes in.

Based on your comments, it sounds like you're interested in document collaboration workflows which is not currently a focus of FileFramework. If you're interested in using FileFramework in those type of use cases talk with Miglius and we can see if we can find a way to collaborate to build those caabilities.

I guess this is pretty much

irinaz's picture

I guess this is pretty much the same thing that I wanted to collaborate on this summer - see http://groups.drupal.org/node/19815.

FileField

enginpost's picture

I am not sure how this relates, and I am new to Drupal, but I have noticed a number of modules that might pull this stuff off:

CCK and Views: To create metadata to wrap around a "document library" (makes Drupal like SharePoint in that respect.)
FileField (still being worked out for D6 but if you apply the available patch you can upload files and get it working with revisions, which is great.)
CheckOut: which is supposed to lock a record until you check it back in. This works great along side File Field which would let you check-out a document (record / node), edit the file of-line, then later upload that document, check-in the record (node) and even roll-back to a previous version of a document.

If this is pretty close, then maybe a whitepaper could be written to explain how to create a basic document library with all of this type of functionality? I think it is fairly simple to envision, but maybe a full write up would help people chase the answer down faster.

Stuff I haven't figured out yet (just starting to fiddle with) would be:

  1. How to group a set of documents (probably a "view" based on document metadata.)
  2. How to restrict access to documents in a simple manner (so a client could build a team/group of people to collaborate on a document without getting an administrator involved... think of this like being the "owner" of a document/node and then deciding who all gets access to only that node, or better yet an "owner" can decided who can gain access to any document in the library associated with some piece of metadata associated with the documents... like a "project" title could be a piece of metadata and the person who creates that project title would associate a group with permissions to a project and only they can see the documents assigned to that particular project.)

If I can figure this stuff out then I could help do a write up on this since I think there are likely a number of groups who could use such functionality. If there are others in the Washington, DC, area that would like to collaborate on this (sorry to be so geo-centric, I guess one wouldn't have to be geolocated here) it might be a fun little side project.

File API

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