Fluent Community Document Management
Hi all, does anyone know, or have they created a document management feature for Fluent Community Spaces? Currently, documents in Fluent Community are Feed posts with content_type = 'document'. Each document is a Feed entry whose files are stored as Media records and linked via document_lists in the feed meta. It works, but it's a very basic flat structure and makes assumptions about adding details about the file(s) and auto checks the 'Publish as post' option.
A few other observations:
- There is no option create/add folders and allow the user to add a file to a new or existing folder.
- It actually won't let you add a file without providing info about the files first. There is a text box, called 'About these files' that needs text in order to simply upload a document - so there are UX issues that are not directly obvious.
- There also does not seem to be a way to delete documents?
Keen to get your thoughts and understand if anyone has a working solution to this, ideally with a folder CRUD structure. I had a quick check on the roadmap, there was a feature request added for this around a year or so ago.
Example where this is useful: any community/organisation that needs file management for collaboration, there are many, many use cases for this.
The current document functionality is definitely very basic...too basic for our needs.
Here's what we did.
We use a plugin called Out-of-the-Box (https://www.wpcloudplugins.com/) that supports Dropbox (they also have plugins that use SharePoint/OneDrive, Box, and Google Drive). The plugin allows setting permissions for uploading, deleting, etc. based on WordPress roles.
We created a folder structure in Dropbox...one folder per FluentCommunity space that we need document functionality in. We then created regular WordPress pages for each space containing the above plugin configured to load the folder for the relevant space.
I then wrote code that replaces the FluentCommunity documents link within the space with a link to the Dropbox page for that space. The regular WordPress page with the Dropbox plugin in it even has a matching menu with Posts, Members, and Documents at the top right.
It all looks like it is fully integrated and if you didn't know how it was built, you probably wouldn't realize the regular WordPress document pages were not built into FluentCommunity.
Hopefully all that makes sense.
It is perfect. Nope, not even close. I wish the documents functionality in FluentCommunity was better but I doubt it will ever have all the features that the solution detailed above has. Having a fully FluentCommunity compatible solution would definitely be better but this solution is working great so far.
If anyone wants more details, let me know.
Thomas Oates Thanks Thomas, I will take a look at this. The client uses OneDrive/Sharepoint and this may be a good shout for them 👍
Hi Tony Baker I have a plan to create something similar to this for one of my clients, it's only on the idea list at the moment, but might be worth have a chat/keeping in touch 👍
Cheers David Churchill, it's an interesting situation, and I am very keen to look at options for this. I did quite a lot of research today, and there are actually very few options for this in the WP space. A few doc management plugins, but they tend to lean on WP admin access and started their life as more page/post/media folder structuring than actual front-end document management.
The solution Thomas recommended fits in quite well, but the licensing model of the software is not great via Envato. The only other one that I came across, which looks promising, is DocMan, but the UI is quite poor and feels like it was put together in the 90's with Bootstrap v1. 😊
FluentCommunity has its own media object and database structure which is really more feature-rich than their own implementation would suggest. There's tons of potential built in that just needs exposed correctly. The system requires a media object to be associated with a feed object for it to exist. This lets orphaned media that was uploaded and never posted be removed, and is why a post and content is required to create media in core fcom. To delete a document you would delete the post and it would then get cleaned up in the next job as an orhpaned file.
I use fcom media over wp media across my add-ons for attaching files to knowledge base, and uploading materials for events. For the latter I needed exactly what you described and have built WP media style uploader and a folder based document browser to organise into lesson folders.
One of the cool things fcom already has built in but not exposed is full media tracking. So just now you have to upload course files to individual lessons with no real way to see ALL documents from that course, but you can add that. Similarly, you may personally as a user upload documents to posts in different spaces but there's no way to see all YOUR media. But the code is in there.