EFF's file management needs

Hey there - I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and we are migrating our huge old legacy site into Drupal. We are trying to get some help developing some additions to the file upload module, and Zack suggested I post our specs here for feedback from you all.

Here's the email I sent him with the specs of our dream file upload module:

EFF needs a file upload and organization module that interacts with files stored on the filesystem. There are some contributed modules with similar functionality, but none that do exactly what we need. It's my belief that adding functionality to the existing 'upload' module that comes with Drupal would be a fine approach.

We have legal case pages which often contain upwards of 50 legal documents in PDF format, organized in different ways. Sometimes by date, but more often by case or by type of document. For some examples:

http://eff.org/legal/cases/att
http://eff.org/Activism/E-voting

Here are some specs for the module I envision to manage these files:

• Document categories/headers

In the file upload area of any node, in an interface not unlike the taxonomy vocabulary setup interface, users should be able to specify a header for a number of documents in a list. Some example headers would be "Motion to Dismiss" or "Injunction" or "Notes from Special Meeting."

Nested categories would be extremely useful, but not required in the first revision.

Headers should be typed freely into a text box, and the list of headers to choose from should be in a pulldown menu.

Only some user roles should be allowed to specify headers, but any user with access to the upload module should be able to choose from a header.

• Document locations on the server

Currently, the Upload module puts uploaded files into a simple directory at /files. In the EFF Drupal setup, we've edited the rewrite rules so that we may serve flat files (such as .txt, .pdf, or images) on the filesystem, while simultaneously serving Drupal pages at the same path. For example, we have a directory called /sony on the filesystem, and a page node in Drupal that has /sony as its URL path.

The file organization module should gather information from the URL path setting for the node, and default to uploading the file into the corresponding directory on the filesystem. If a user is editing the Sony page, and attaches a file, the file should automatically be uploaded into the /sony/ directory on the filesystem.

This default setting should be displayed in a text field in the upload interface, with the option to edit based on user roles. Some user roles should be able to edit the upload directory, some not.

• Uploading Documents

Users should be able to upload a single document from their local machine, as the upload module allows now, and add a title.

Users should be able to upload multiple files into a specific category, in the interface that is best for this. My inclination would be to allow users to upload a .zip or .tar, though this has security implications, so maybe there is a better way.

In an instance wherein a user uploads numerous documents, they should be able to add titles for them after the fact.

• Displaying Documents

On the site, files should be displayed as they are now, with title or filename, and size.

A "very nice to have" feature would be if files could be sorted by date or category.

• Automatically seeing files on the filesystem

Because we are moving many PDFs over from flat storage, it would be amazingly wonderful if this module could "see" files which exist in the corresponding directories on the filesystem. This idea is not well thought out right now, but presumbably only files certain specified extensions would appear in the upload interface automatically, and then be able to have titles assigned to them.