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1. beaufortjazz
   Member
   May 26, 2010, 8:20 AM

   I didnt know if this has ever been discussed - and appreciate that this might be stretching the capabilities of WordPress.

   I was thinking that it would be useful for one project to upload a number of documents to the media centre and to be able to tag them in some way so that relevent documents could be found by the user of the blog. The documents would mainly be pdfs of agendas and minutes and there would be some that would have to be added retrospectively.

   It would seem that to be able to do this would require a post of some sort to refer to each of the documents? Are any themes better than others for this kind of use?

   The blog would be private and restricted to a number of users.

   Many thanks for any thoughts here.

   Regards.

2. patrickobrien
   Member
   May 26, 2010, 10:12 AM

   Greetings . . .

   These past 18 months I have been working on a small project for which I built a "Web Site" using The Journalist theme (version 1.3) to archive relevant documents in PDF and Doc formats; a file directory, if you will

   http://newletters.wordpress.com/

   I achieved the layout shown by simply creating a series of "static pages" -- each of which, effectively, are an index of the uploaded files that each contain

   Note: prior uploading new files to any of the "Pages" it is necessary to edit the publishing date of that "Page" to ensure the new file has the correct month/date included in its URL

   My file directory is open to the public; it is a simple matter to mark it as 'private' or 'restricted' to suit your intended purpose

   Best wishes

   Patrick O'Brien

3. maidiebike
   Member
   May 26, 2010, 3:15 PM

   Interesting Patrick. Perhaps if the collection of .pdfs by beaufortjazz was small, maybe an agenda and meeting minutes per month, it could be manageable. At least for older archived documents that are no longer in original Microsoft Word. It is tough on the users who have to "guess" at the contents of meeting minutes.

   But it does make google searching (or even WordPress's own search engine by using the blog search box) very difficult unless the .pdf documents were scanned for optical character recognition. Of course, that means more server memory.

   My tendency for future meeting minutes and agendas, going forward, is to put full-text per post, so that the agenda and minutes are searchable. Otherwise what is the real value of having it electronic if people can't easily find what they want?

   Some of the WordPress themes have archive page templates so if posts were meta-tagged carefully, one could pull up a list of posts on certain tag topics.

   However, I await better creative solutions from other WordPress members here.

   From someone who managed a document management system for 100,000+ electronic documents-- including 2,500 unique team meeting minutes. (No, IMHO WordPress is not a true robust content management systsem.)

4. beaufortjazz
   Member
   May 26, 2010, 3:42 PM

   Many thanks for the responses. It is much appreciated and they have given me some food for thought.

   For the project I had in mind there are probably too many documents.

   It was my original intention to use about 5 or 6 tags per document so that I and a limited number of users could search on major issues.

   Thank you again for the input.

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